


children of the wild ones

by satellites (brella)



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Everybody Dies, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-19
Updated: 2013-10-19
Packaged: 2017-12-29 21:35:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1010375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where instead of being students at Morning Glory Academy, they’re all tributes in the Hunger Games, and the odds are in no one’s favor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	children of the wild ones

**Author's Note:**

> I. Uh. Oops. (here's a [playlist](http://8tracks.com/brella/children-of-the-wild-ones).)  
> I started this on Friday night and now here we are. Special ultra sincere thanks go out to Macey, whose agony assured me that I was on the right track with this, and who helped me plan out like ten of the deaths, so you’re great, friend. And of course, Cat, whose emotional turbulence inspired me to finish this thing. Love you guys. I hope we’re still cool after this.

“Casey Blevins!”

The name comes out in a squeal that pierces the swollen summer air, and as the ocean of blank faces turns as one to face her, Casey Blevins’s senses seem, for a moment, to fail her.

A gust of balmy wind ambles through the courtyard, coaxing goosebumps across her skin. In a muffled thump of sound and time, her awareness returns to her: she hears the escort who had cried out her name clapping her hands and giggling, and she hears a starling in the trees, far away. She smells grass and smoke. She sees sunlight, the cerulean sky, the slumped shoulders of a hundred other kids she only superficially knows.

Her feet carry her forward automatically. She stands up straight like her mother always told her to, and she tucks any loose strands of blonde behind her ear, and she does not permit her face to give even the slightest twitch of a reaction. The crowd parts for her, silent and commiserating, and the dry dirt crunches under her boots, and she breathes in and out through her nose, subduing the unwelcome erratic jolts of her heartbeat.

She takes the stairs to the stage with intent, and when her heels hit the wood, it’s clear and crisp. She trains her eyes on the escort – a girl perhaps a couple of years older than she, with straight brown hair and dreary blue eyes just a tad too wide that are unreached by her starkly-hewn smile. Casey forgets her name. It starts with a P, she thinks.

“Hey there, Casey-Wasey!” she chirps, grabbing Casey by the elbow and yanking her the last few steps up to the microphone. She lifts Casey’s arm into the air and faces the crowd, bouncing slightly. “How about a hand for your new tribute, huh, Sevens? Come onnnn!”

Scattered applause ripples through the group. The escort groans, dropping Casey’s arm.

“Ughhhhh, you guys are so _grim_!” she whines, stamping her foot. She perks back up in an instant. “Maybe the second name’ll wake you party poopers up.”

She makes a show out of rummaging through the slips of paper in the fishbowl that rests on the gilded pillar next to her. Casey watches the throng, but all eyes are on the escort’s twiddling fingers, her animated bouncing.

She pinches a single slip between her thumb and index finger, whipping it out with a shriek of, “Wheee!”

The sun is almost at high noon. Casey is too busy noticing this, impartially, to hear the name when it is revealed; only when she hears a child’s scream of protest and the scuffle of guards does she come back to attention.

She sees the flash of red hair first. The body attached to it is hunkered down on its knees in the dirt, its hands shakily grasping the small shoulders of a young and wet-faced boy with brown hair, flanked by two guards.

“Be good, buddy, okay?” a voice says. It’s trying to sound reassuring, but it quavers and cracks. “We talked about this. They’re gonna get mad if you’re not good, Andy.”

The boy sobs without subtlety, and it’s only then that Casey’s stomach begins to constrict, and it’s only then that the scene before her sharpens into clarity. She starts to step forward, but the escort’s arm flies out and halts her.

“Hunter!” the escort singsongs. Casey breathes back a snort. He _should_ be in the Games, with a name like that. “Hunter-Bo- _Bunterrrr_! I called your _naa-aame_!”

“I know, I know; just—” Bright green eyes flash toward the stage, and orange eyebrows stitch together. “Just give me one second, _please_ —”

“One, Mississippi!” the escort yells, and then claps her hands once. “Do you wanna get _carried_ up here, lazy butt, or walk on your own two feet? Chop-chop! You have an audience and they’re _wai_ –ting!”

His Adam’s apple bobs and Casey’s eyes with it. After a second – after another mournful warble of the starling – his palms slip limply off of the boy called Andy, and he stands, the knees of his gray slacks caked with flaxen dust. As he turns to walk to the stage, the boy yelps out a “ _No_!” and grips his sleeve in one hand, but before anything further can be done or said, the guards have grabbed him at the shirt collar and yanked him back.

He kicks and screams and writhes, snot bubbling from his nose, as the guards haul him away. His tantrum does not stop, even when the wooden doors to the courtyard close behind the guards. When Casey looks back to Hunter, his face is contorted with pain, but he is still walking.

His posture is not as good as hers. He slouches and shuffles. On the second stair, he trips, and Casey grimaces on his behalf.

The escort flounces over to meet him and clasps his wrist, dragging him over to the other side of the microphone from Casey. She stands between them, beaming woodenly out at the gathering, and throws her arms out.

“District Seven, I present to you, your tributes for the 74th Annual Hunger Games!” she cheers, clapping her hands and jumping up and down. “And, from one friend to another, Casey-Basey and Hunter-Wunter: may the odds be _ever_ in your favor! Yeesh, you could stand to _smile_ a little—this is gonna be _fun_!”

There is no applause this time. Casey’s straight spine does not falter. When she glances out of the corner of her eye at the boy who is to be her partner, she sees that he is staring at her with eyes greener than the deepest and purest summers, and he is not looking away.

She reminds herself right away that she will almost certainly have to kill him if she wants to survive, presently-brewing plans of rebellion or not. That’s just how these things work.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Casey’s father had always anticipated the possibility—the likelihood, even, because the Capitol does so love the Pure-Hearted Blonde type—of his daughter being Reaped. Because of this, he had trained her to hunt, to fish, to fight, to run, to survive. To kill, even. Her mother had not been so percipient, but Casey had seen in the way she would wring her hands and skip meals that she had not been as blind as she had always tried to pretend she was.

Casey does not know why the Capitol had had them killed. Resistance, probably. They hate that. It had happened only a year ago, but Casey’s wounds had scabbed and scarred rapidly. Compartmentalizing was—is—one of her many talents. She lives in the house alone and still cleans the sheets of her parents’ untouched bed once a week. She still plants gardenias for her mother. She still cooks salmon on Fridays for her father, even though she can never eat it all herself.

She doesn’t know Hunter. Not really. District Seven is big, separated into vague divisions by miles of thick forest. It’s hard to know someone when you’d have to fight a bear to reach their town. And Casey had never been very keen on leaving home, despite her bold ways, especially after... _after_.

They’re the lumber district, so everyone’s arms are strong; Casey’s father had taught her wood-chopping from the time she was tall enough to wield a hatchet, so her upper limbs are shaped with muscle. Hunter’s are not so, she notices; they are thin and ordinary and they bend toward the back of his neck nearly all the time.

He’s gentle, and easily tired, and blatantly scared. He isn’t going to last long.

Casey has no visitors after the Reaping. She waits silently in the parlor with her back straight against the wooden surface of her chair and her fingers idly fidgeting in her lap. The walls around her are polished oak, and dust sifts through the lines of sunlight cutting in through the open window. The pine boughs outside rustle together, and robins are chirruping somewhere nearby.

A door creaks open and the same shuffling footsteps that had disturbed the dirt in the courtyard slip over the hardwood floor. Casey glances up.

Hunter’s dress shirt is rumpled and his nose is running. He wipes it with the back of his hand and sniffles like a kid. He does not hesitate before taking the seat beside her, but he doesn’t look at her. His eyes are edged in red.

“Are you okay?” she ventures. It sounds stupid the moment she says it, but there it is, curled in the empty room.

He shrugs noncommittally, staring at his feet, his hand going to the back of his neck. They’ll probably like that little habit when the tributes are presented to the public. It makes him look humble.

“Was that boy your brother?” she tries again.

Hunter sniffs again. “Nah, step-brother.”

“Oh.” Casey pauses. “And your parents?”

Something twitches on Hunter’s lips and his eyelids go low. “My dad didn’t seem too broken up, if that’s what you mean.”

“I—”

“You been waiting long?” he asks, finally loosening to slump forward in the chair, resting his elbows on his knees. He tilts his head to meet her eye, his expression vaguely imploring, though for what, she doesn’t know.

“Not really,” she lies. “I’m Casey.”

“I know,” he says.

“I know you know,” she retorts a little too brusquely, and his eyes flick down. “I just… wanted to introduce myself normally. That’s all. I figure I—we owe each other that much.”

After a moment, he smiles wanly and extends his (freckled, uncallused) hand. “Hunter.”

Casey bites the inside of her cheek. People who shake hands shouldn’t kill each other.

She takes it, locking eyes with him and giving him her best warm beam. She can’t be sure, but she swears his cheeks get just slightly pinker.

“Nice to meet you,” she lies again, just as the door bursts open. It’s the escort—Casey now knows her name is Pamela.

“Hey, there, kiddly-widdlies!” Pamela crows, her hair bouncing behind her. “Train’s waiting! Oh my gee goshers, just _wait_ until you see the view of the trip, it’s _gorgeous_. Hurry up, hurry _uppp_!”

Hunter and Casey turn to look back at each other in perfect tandem.

Hunter shrugs a little weakly. “Ladies first?”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“One of you is gonna have to go,” their mentor tells them frankly, her arms folded, her feet spread firmly apart, as the train rattles along and the firs blur into rolling hills. “Just gonna rip that Band-Aid right off. You are going to have to kill people; I’m sure you knew that, but most of you little morons tend to forget that when the chips are down, one of you might wind up having to kill the other. That’s just how these work; trust me, I’ve lived ’em twice.”

Pamela had departed the moment the doors of the train had closed, skittering two cars down with a cheery call over her shoulder to be polite. The woman she has left them with is short but robust, her skin deeply tanned and her eyes discerning. She's dressed in a khaki shirt and matching shorts and hiking boots. She does not smile.

“Holy crap,” Hunter blurts out, as though something has just dawned on him. He points dumbly. “You’re—”

“Lara Hodge, yes; save the awe and admiration,” their mentor sneers, rolling her eyes. “What we need to concentrate on from here on out is how not to die, and it’s my job to help you do that, even though I guarantee that at least one of you is going to, if by some miracle you aren’t both plowed down at the Cornucopia.”

“Wow,” Casey deadpans, her arms going defiantly akimbo. “Thanks for the encouragement.”

Hodge snorts. “Trust me, kid, when it comes to the Games, honesty is the best preparation you can get. I may be giving you a crash course in stuff you _really_ don’t want to hear, but it could wind up saving your skin.”

“That’s, um.” Hunter scratches his head. “Heartening.”

Despite Casey’s lack of reaction, she’s certainly heard of Lara Hodge. There are very few people who haven’t. Seven years ago, Hodge—then eighteen—had been Reaped as a tribute for District 7. That year had been notable for one reason above all else—the Games then were, and still are, the longest in history.

Hodge had kept out of sight for the entire duration, idly watching her competitors pick each other off one by one, until only one remained; she had beaten his face with a rock until it had been pulpy and unrecognizable. The entire world had been dumbstruck by her tactics—after all, she was the illegitimate daughter of the President himself (one of many); should she not have been more naturally savage from the beginning? Why save such visceral brutality for a stranger? Was this girl a coward, or just clever?

When asked about her feelings on winning, she, with her wild curly hair and her steady yellow-green eyes, had looked dead at the camera and answered, “It’s over now. I have proven my love.”

Casey, nine then, had not understood. No one had really known what it had meant, but after that, Lara Hodge was offered and accepted permanent residence in District 1, only taking trains to District 7 when she would need to mentor.

There are no other mentors besides her. Sevens are not, nor have they ever been, very lucky.

“So,” Hodge says, flopping easily down on one of the scarlet-upholstered couches at the right of the car. “Come on, sit down. We can eat, and then we can talk strategy.”

“Jumping right into this, aren’t you?” Casey mutters with a skeptical frown. Hodge does not respond.

“Strategy?” Hunter repeats, loitering. Casey sits on the loveseat opposite Hodge, clasping her hands in her lap, and when Hunter doesn’t follow, she catches his eye and pats the space beside her.

He flushes. It intensifies when he eases himself down next to her, pinning his hands under his legs and staring pointedly at the opposite window. The sky beyond is a deep blue, a dissonant vibrance when built to frame the death lingering hungrily at the end of the train tracks in the Capitol.

“Yeah, they can be pretty useful; I don’t know if you’ve heard,” Hodge sneers. Hunter glances down, rubbing the back of his neck. “What are your skill sets? What can you _do_?”

“I…” Hunter swallows. “I can run. I’m a pretty good runner.”

Hodge lets out an unrestrained, “ _Ha_!” and nothing more. Her eyes swivel to Casey, and she crosses one leg over the other.

“How about you, Blondie?” she asks.

Casey shrugs coolly. “Maybe we should be discussing what I _can’t_ do.”

"Hmph. Confident." Hodge’s smirk is sharp. “That's good. I like you. If you’re lucky, they will, too.”

“They will,” Hunter pipes in confidently, and Hodge’s eyes gleam in a way that Casey can’t identify.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There are no trees in the Capitol, only clean streets and strange clothes and way too many glass buildings, and everything is gilded and shimmering. It makes Casey extremely uncomfortable.

The Opening Ceremonies are not scheduled that year, a change that takes Casey aback, but Hodge explains that it’s because the Capitol wants to try a new tactic with the emotional investment audience, and that tactic involves keeping them in suspense a little while longer.

“Always the goddamn theatrics,” Hodge mutters with a shake of her head. The three of them are standing in an elevator at the Training Center, ascending to the seventh floor. “Fifty bucks says it was Abraham’s idea.”

“Abraham?” Hunter asks. He tends to do that with a lot of name drops, Casey is quickly discovering. His naïveté would be endearing if it weren't a weakness.

“The Head of the Gamemaking Committee,” Hodge explains. “Memorize that name, kid. He’s gonna be designing your playing field.” Under her breath, she mutinously adds, “You’d think the fact that his own _son_ was Reaped this year would make him a little more _invested_ in the PR…”  

Hunter’s fingers comb his hair back sheepishly and he scuffs his heel against the carpeted floor. The elevator comes to a halt with a muted _ping_ and the doors slide apart, barely a whisper of sound.

And let Casey be perfectly clear. She is unaccustomed to spaciousness when it comes to habitation; the cabin that her parents had built had been sturdy and pragmatic, and it it had not been perfect—Casey’s hands, when she’d been little, had always been full of splinters from running them along the unbuffered wood of the loft where she slept—but it had been comforting, the simplicity and the sensibility.

The room into which she and Hunter step with Lara Hodge is not any of these things.

Three steps lead down to a sleek white tiled floor and two long cobalt couches, a marble coffee table with an explosive bouquet of bluebells, a symmetrical goldenrod rug. Off to the left is a long glass dining table, already set with food; at the opposite end of the elevator doorway is a wall entirely comprised of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the kaleidoscopic light canopy of the Capitol; and to the right, Casey sees a hallway leading to what are no doubt the bedrooms and bathrooms. There is no kitchen or deck, which throws her.

Her throat burns. She realizes, in a tidal crash of lucidity, that she may never go home again, that a hundred other tributes have stepped into this penthouse and have been floored by its ostentatious appearance, and have then been sprawled among the wildflowers with their throats cut. She gulps back the swell of heat behind her eyes and passes it off as an idle clearing of her throat, but judging by the aside look Hunter gives her, he notices what it really means.

“You’ll meet the other tributes tomorrow,” Hodge says softly—so uncharacteristically so, in fact, that Casey turns fully around to face her with raised eyebrows. “For now, eat. Get some sleep. Big day coming up.”

“Sleep,” Hunter mutters, and his smile is wry but distinctly haggard. “Funny.”   

Casey’s throat feels tighter than it did a moment ago. Hodge gives Hunter an unreadable look and sighs before turning back into the elevator. The doors close around her and the apartment falls into silence as Casey, unsure, waits for Hunter to speak.

His stillness concerns her. For most of the train ride, he hadn’t been able to stop talking.

“You hungry?” he asks after a moment.

Casey shakes her head. “Not really.” Spitefully, she adds, “And even if I was, _their_ food is the _last_ thing I’d eat.”

“They probably have this room bugged, y’know,” he reminds her. “They’re not gonna like you saying stuff like that.”

“Let them not like it,” Casey growls, giving the room a defiant glare. “What’re they gonna do, stick me in the Hunger Games? Oh. Wait.”

“Don’t act like you weren’t hoping for this,” Hunter mutters under his breath, barely audible—but Casey still hears it.

Her head jerks towards him, and he bows his, his hand going again to the nape of his neck.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks.

He shakes his head and does not answer. Casey’s hands curl into fists and her blood pumps through her with far too potent of a rhythm for her liking, but before she can say much else, Hunter has taken a step back toward the hallway, his eyes purposefully avoiding hers.

“I’m going to bed,” he tells her. “See you tomorrow, Casey.”

Casey does not reply. After he has gone, she takes every piece of food from the table, precisely and with care, and throws it into the silver garbage chute against the leftmost wall.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_“Casey, you have to listen to me,” her father told her as the sun scattered light across his face, fragmented by the leaves of the oak tree. “Life is a fight sometimes. That’s why I’m raising you to be a fighter. So you can always beat it right back if it ever beats you. You fight for everyone, Casey. You fight for me and your mom and your friends and all of the world. You fight until you can’t stand anymore and then some. You fight them. Even, God forbid, if we aren’t here to cheer you on. Always fight. You might be the only one who really can.”_

 

 

* * *

 

 

The first Career she sees is Irina.

The Training Room is vast and air conditioned to staleness, and all of the floors and walls are black. The tech and equipment is of the highest caliber, which Casey obviously isn’t going to complain about, and there’s a window high up from which the Gamemakers observe the training with their stuffed pig and their red wine.

Casey had thought that she’d be the first in the room that morning, since she had not slept throughout the night (which had given her plenty of time to observe that Hunter snores and talks in his sleep) and had pulled on her uniform before the sun had even risen, but someone is already there when she walks in. She halts at the doorway and steps back, evaluating.

In front of the archery range is a girl no older than Casey herself. Her skin is pallid and her black, black hair is cut into a sleek bob. She’s lean and vengeful-looking, and her gunmetal eyes are narrowed with concentration as she pulls back her bowstring.

“I know you are there,” she says, very suddenly, without moving or glancing aside. Her voice is woven with a distinctive accent—maybe Eastern European, or Russian. “Are you afraid of me?”

“No,” Casey replies, with conviction, but she’ll admit that it had taken her a beat too long to say it.

“Hm,” the girl chuffs out. “How unwise.”

She releases the bowstring without flinching and, even from her angle, Casey can see that the arrow hits the bullseye dead-center. The thump of impact seems razor-sharp in the quiet.

The girl lowers her bow. When she finally turns her head to smirk smugly at Casey, her body shifting to face her, Casey can see that she has a long white scar on her cheek. She doesn’t blink.

“What is your District?” the girl demands, sounding as though there is nothing in the world she cares less about.

Casey considers lying, but doesn’t. “Seven. You?”

The girl chuckles through her nose, picking a speck of dust off of the tip of her bow. “I am a Career. District One.”

Casey will not permit her blood to chill. She tosses her hair over her shoulder, feigning impartiality.

“I am called Irina,” the girl tells her, striding forward. When she reaches Casey, Casey does not balk, and Irina smiles sharply as though impressed. “Remember it, Seven. It will be the name you will be begging for mercy.”

Casey, after a moment, gives a smile of her own, even though her heart has begun to thud.

“We’ll see,” she says, and true, it isn’t the best comeback, but it isn’t running away, which is just as good.

Irina gives a “hmph” and flicks her eyes up and down Casey analytically, one dark eyebrow arching. She says nothing more, pivoting around on one foot to return to her archery, and Casey lingers in place, deciding it best to wait for Hunter before leaping into combat training.

By 8:15, the rest of the tributes have all trickled in. Casey takes note of them all, listens carefully for their names. (Considers the most efficient ways to neutralize them if necessary. Which it will be.)

The other District 1 Career is a muscular boy with beige hair and a perpetual expression of condescension. His name is Guillaume. He is spiteful and brutal and he spends a considerable chunk of time at the bench press, lifting with frightening ease; afterwards, he loiters by the hand-to-hand ring with an odd look in his eyes, until he finds a sparring mate in one of the Fours.

District 4 had deviated from the typical boy-and-girl tribute format and had instead chosen a pair of twin brothers. Both are imposing and fit; one is stoic and soft-spoken, while his brother is angry and bellicose. Casey doesn’t find out their names until the end of the day, and frankly, she doesn’t even know which is which—but one is Hisao, and one is Jun. Whichever one of them takes on Guillaume is a force to be reckoned with, but Casey can’t help noticing that, despite how bloody and sweaty he and Guillaume are, they do not stop smiling at each other, like two old friends reuniting under laughable circumstances.

District 2 is also a Career district, and their two tributes are haughty and beautiful: one, an acerbic and voluptuous girl named Zoe with long black hair and a smirk even more drastically curved than Irina’s; and her partner, Ike, a boy with clear blue eyes and short sandy hair and the most profoundly despicable personality that Casey has ever encountered. He seems relatively useless, preferring to stand on the sidelines and jeer at the other tributes, but Zoe is disconcertingly good with the throwing knives.

District 3’s tributes are both too young for the world into which they’ve been thrust; the boy, Ian, is skinny and bitter and cowardly, with uneven teeth and knobbly elbows that stick out awkwardly. He wears glasses, too, a hindrance that Casey knows someone is going to exploit. The girl, Akiko, jokes and laughs too much, and she is not so inclined toward hand-to-hand combat, but Casey watches her make poisons and bombs from only the sampling of natural items provided. They bicker and shove at each other almost nonstop, but there is a certain routine to it that makes Casey think, grimly, that losing each other will be harder than they are trying to make it seem.  

Ian is an utter failure at all things physical, which makes Casey almost positive that his chances are poor, but there’s an analytical and scheming way to his thinking that she doesn’t see in the others, so he may wind up surprising her. Even if he does trail after Akiko with far too much devotion for his own good.

Then there’s the Fives and the Sixes. None of them look to be of note or fortune. District 5’s pair are both girls: a dry-witted and sneaky one named Maggie, who has a pink streak in her hair, and an unsmiling and furtive one named Hannah, who limps. Wit and intelligence are useless in the Games, Casey knows. She’ll be surprised if they make it past the Cornucopia.

The girl from District 6 is Esi, and she wears an intricate blue scarf on her head; she is good-hearted and even-tempered, but there is something about her omnipresent soft smile that gives Casey the impression that she is perpetually thinking ahead. Her companion is Andres, and he speaks with passion about books and poetry and with flippancy about life, but fails to do much else except correctly sort out which plants are poisonous and which are not.

District 9’s tributes are an ordinary duo, a frightened red-haired girl named Amanda and a boy named Chad who is still, apparently, working through his shock. Despite the mild athleticism that could probably be used in his favor, he asks too many questions and fears death, and she is not far behind him. 

After Andres finishes at the plant matching station, a girl Casey does not know takes his place. She is doe-eyed and pretty, and her black hair falls straight down to her mid-back. Her partner approaches her, a boy with dark and untidy hair, and kisses her temple. Her hand slips down to grasp his, and they share a silent look, and Casey stops watching them, feeling as though she’s intruding on something.

District 10 is the agriculture district, and Casey’s stomach gives a pang when the relation between their tributes becomes clear—they are brother and sister. The brother, Jimmy, is broad-chested and drawling and fiercely protective; he can lift heavy objects and his survivalist tactics are second to none. His younger sister, Jade, has the fieriest hair that Casey has ever seen; her face is splattered with freckles, and she has not stopped crying since she had walked into the training room with her brother.

Finally, there’s District 11, and Casey can safely say that their tributes are the most disconcerting of them all, and not because of any proficiency in killing or propensity for merciless violence, but because they do not say a single word to anyone, lingering vaguely at each other’s elbows but never interacting. The boy keeps his hands clasped and whispers to himself in a language that Casey recognizes as Portuguese; the girl, her head shaved, her eyes sunken, murmurs in the same tone, but in Spanish, and only a single phrase.

“ _La hora de nuestra liberación se acerca_ ,” she repeats. “ _La hora de nuestra liberación se acerca_.”

“ _Pai Nosso que estais nos céus, santificado é o Vosso nome_ ,” the boy mutters beside her. “ _Venha a nós o Vosso reino, seja feita a Vossa vontade_ …”

It makes sense. Districts 11 and 12 are notorious for being a cultural amalgam, owing to the fact that most of the victims of the Capitol’s greed had been forced to migrate there after the destruction of District 13. The boy’s arms are thin, like Hunter’s, but not weak. The girl’s legs and fingers are long.

The tributes from District 12, both boys, are even less notable—Casey doesn’t bother learning their names.

At 9:00, Hunter comes busting in, flinging the doors apart and sprinting harum-scarum over to Casey. She gives him a chastising look, her arms folded, as he catches his breath in front of her, doubled-over.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry I’m late,” he pants. “Overslept…”

“You know, this is just an observation,” Casey tells him as idly as she can manage, “but it seems kind of counterintuitive to waste valuable prep time when you’re going to be forced into a bloodbath in a week, doesn’t it?”

Hunter straightens, his hand going to his neck.

“Well,” he mumbles. “When, um, when you put it that way—”

“Ah!” a voice exclaims from their left, and their heads both turn in unison. “And the gang’s all here. Who’s ready for a little Kumbaya?”

A glare pinches itself onto the bridge of Casey’s nose. The speaker is Ike, the boy from District 2. His training uniform fits him snugly, and a few strands of hair are loose from the combed-back mass. He is smirking wickedly.

“I mean, it seems only appropriate,” he continues. “Why not get to know each other before we tear each other apart like wild animals? Am I right?”

“And you are?” Jade, the girl from District 10, asks coldly.

“Isaac,” Ike replies. “Friends know me as Ike, but then again, you aren’t my friends—hm, that _is_ a conundrum. Perhaps ‘Victor’ will do?”  

Casey’s face works its way into a sneer. The retort slips out of her before she can even think on it. “‘Asshole’ sounds pretty good, actually.”

“Casey,” Hunter hisses, and several of the others mutter among themselves, but Ike had heard her anyway—those sharp blue eyes of his meet hers and a lascivious grin worms its way across his face.

“ _Rowr_. Aren’t you a little too pretty to be wrapped up in something like this?” he asks, stroking his chin and looking her up and down with intent. “Not that I’m _complaining_ , of course.”

“Look who’s talking,” Casey retorts. His thin eyebrows go up.

“My goodness,” he remarks. “Are you hitting on me?”

“No,” Casey assures him. “I’m saying looks can be deceiving.”

Ike snorts, sounding impressed. Casey juts her chin out, and Hunter hovers awkwardly behind her, clearly trying to appear protective. Ike takes notice, sneering derisively at him.

“I’m shaking in my boots,” he deadpans. “Aren’t you, Zoe?”

“He acts like we’re friends, but we’re not,” Zoe tells them all, running a finger along the blade of a knife from the weapons table. “I’m probably going to cut his skeevy heart out and wear it as a necklace. If I feel like it.”

“Delightfully charming, isn’t she?” Ike says perkily. “But all jest aside, Seven—if you happen to find a little spare time and a secluded cave during the games…” He winks at her, clicking his tongue. “Whistle for me. We can arrange something.”

Casey nods contemplatively before grabbing his head at either side, thrusting her knee sharply up, and slamming his face into it.

A _crunch_ sounds harshly in the quiet. He stumbles back, cursing foully, when she releases him. Casey glances to the Gamemakers’ window. They are all watching, no doubt sending guards in—tributes are not supposed to fight before the Games unless they’re sparring.

Ike straightens after a moment, his nose gushing blood. He examines the crimson smear on his palm with genuine curiosity before flicking it off, splattering it onto the floor. When he smiles crookedly at Casey, there are red lines between his teeth.

“Spunk,” he says. “I like that. So will they, quite frankly; they do so love a girl who doesn’t lose her head. Offer still stands.”

“I can take him,” Hunter mutters, an offer, into Casey’s ear.

She waves him back and Ike leers at him, wiping blood from his nostrils.

“Down, lapdog,” he taunts, and Hunter bristles, starting to surge forward, but Casey halts him again with a flung out arm. “She’s got you on a short leash there. Hope it’s still comfortable when she uses it to strangle you in our heavily wooded paradise when the time comes; that’ll be a tearjerker, I’m sure.”

“She won’t,” Hunter says with confidence.

Casey’s stomach squirms.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Casey’s evaluative private session with the Gamemakers goes well, in her opinion. She spends the three training days practicing in the survival station and the archery range, though her weapon of choice is a crossbow, which Irina scoffs disparagingly at.

She hits all of her targets with precision, and when the odds are released that evening, she’s in third place. The three ahead of her are, ascending, Zoe, Guillaume, and Irina. Everyone is surprised to see Hisao tied with Casey, even though his brother is in twelfth place.

Casey swallows her bile. Hunter is in the lowest cluster.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The pre-Games interviews are conducted, as they have been for the last two decades, by Susan Dagney, a warm-natured and amicable woman with silver hair and a voice like a mother’s. They say she can make the audience care about anyone she chooses; that is how talented she is at pretending that she herself cares.

The interviews are held in order of District. Irina, in spangled silver and dark red lipstick, is frigidly cool on the camera, radiating confidence and power. Guillaume, his hair uncharacteristically combed, is the same.

Ike is a hit, bantering effortlessly with Dagney and answering each question with dry witticisms and jokery that makes the audience howl with laughter and thunder with applause. Zoe is not as loquacious, but she still charms the audience with her beautiful face and unflappable demeanor, with her airy laugh and perfect posture.

Ian and Akiko’s interview is abysmal, second only to Fortunato and Megan’s. Their clothes are slightly too big for them and Akiko bristles with discomfiture at being in a dress; Ian stutters and Akiko’s responses are clumsily angry, but Dagney turns the tides slightly in their favor when she laughs at one of their frivolous quarrels toward the end.

The twins say very little.

“What will your aims be when the Games begin?” Dagney inquires, her hands clasped in her lap.

“To win,” Jun growls at the same time Hisao softly murmurs, “To survive.”

If anything, they’re liked because they’re handsome and because the Capitol is completely on board with the idea of pitting twin against twin.

Maggie is friendly and chatty, but Hannah does not give the slightest twitch of a smile or the slightest whisper of a word. Esi and Andres are fantastic – they both speak with such refined poise and intellect, and they’re so _good_ at it that they receive no backlash for turning the interview into an opportunity to make philosophical commentary on the moral wrongness of the Games themselves.

And then it’s hers and Hunter’s turn.

Their designer had fashioned a long and silky dress for Casey that trails along the floor in a perfect puddle of deep pine green; it has no sleeves or straps, and it’s flecked in gold. Hunter is in a suit, tugging at his tie, which is the same color as Casey’s gown; the audience coos its approval when he steps aside and motions for her to sit first.

“My,” Dagney opens, smiling convivially at the two of them in turn. “Aren’t you two precious.”

Hunter’s hand flies to the back of his neck. “Thank you, ma’am.”

The crowd loves it. Casey knew it.

“Now, Hunter, I understand that your Reaping had a bit of a bump,” Dagney says, leaning in slightly. “That being that your younger brother was less than enthused about you being chosen. What did you tell him before you came to the Capitol?”

Hunter blinks at her, his green eyes especially bright in the stage lights. He rubs the nape of his neck, glancing down, and when he speaks, it’s soft, and more than a little sad.

“Stepbrother,” he corrects her in a mumble. “And I, um…” He shrugs. “I told him I’d definitely be back, so he’d better be waiting at the train station with a sign when the Games are over.” He smiles a little ruefully. “Kinda like in the movies, y’know?”

A collective “Awwww” ripples through the studio audience. Casey frowns over at him – he hadn’t told her any of this. It's silly for her to have expected him to; after all, they’ve barely known each other four days, and there are many other things to worry about, but there’s something about this glimpse she gets of him, of the fact that he has another life, another life he will almost definitely _lose_ , that feels like a sock to the ribs.

“And you, Casey,” Dagney reroutes, and Casey straightens at being addressed. “What did you say to your family?”

Casey’s eyelids lower. Hunter glances up sharply, his eyes darting between her and Dagney with something resembling concern, but there’s no need for it – Casey takes a breath, and teaches her lips to quirk up into a clement smile.

“Before they died,” she replies, and the audience sucks in a quiet and pitying gasp, “I said I loved them, and that I would never stop fighting.”

There’s applause at that. Dagney nods approvingly, crossing one leg over the other.

“That’s a very good attitude to have,” she remarks. “And… feel free to call this a bored woman’s gossipy curiosity, but I really must ask—do either of you have anyone special waiting back home? You’re both just such delightful young people; I can’t imagine you _not_.”

Casey opens her mouth to answer, but Hunter is ahead of her.

“Yeah, actually,” he says.

Casey stares at him. The spectators “oooooh” with intrigue, and even Dagney looks pleased, inclining herself forward conspiratorially.

“But of course,” she tells him with a light chuckle. “Come now, don’t be shy. Let us in on the secret. At least a _name_.”

Hunter’s eyes wander errantly before finally meeting Casey’s. His red, red hair is combed nicely and his gentle face is illuminated golden in the light from overhead.

“Casey,” he whispers.

She blinks. “Y-Yeah?”

He swallows, never breaking his gaze, never blinking.

“No, it’s—” He inhales shakily, his cheeks flushing, and gives her a tentative smile that, despite its poor foundation, is startlingly genuine. “That’s her name, see. Her name is Casey Blevins.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“What the fuck was that?!” she screams, pinning him to the wall. “What _was_ that, Hunter?! What were you thinking?!”

“Casey, just—I’m sorry!” If his cheeks were pink onstage, they’re even redder now, and he’s gripping her arm as she uses it to hold his chest in place, and his breathing is heavy. “Hodge told me to do it, all right? It wasn’t my idea.”

“Then what the fuck was _she_ thinking?” Casey snarls. She raises her fist – not to hit him, but just to clench it; however, Hunter grimaces and cowers, holding his hands up to shield himself. “You really think we’re going to have time to keep up crap like this when we’re out there? Are you _insane_?”

After he realizes that she’s not going to try knocking his eye out (though she’s tempted), he loosens, lowering his forearms and gulping when he looks her in the eye.

“You never know,” he mutters, sounding peculiarly hopeful. “It might win us some sponsors. They like stuff like this, right? That’s why the guy and girl from District 8 got so much applause.”

The pair from District 8 are in love. Vanessa is beautiful and kind, and Brendan looks upon her with constant and unerring adoration. The Capitol and the viewers gobble up romance and tragedy, especially when combined, and so they’re getting a lot of attention; murmurs of sponsorships have already begun to circulate.

Casey releases him, but doesn’t look away, and though the flaring of her heartbeat is lessening, her deep frown is not.

“Tell me the truth,” she orders him. “What you said up there—about us, about _me_. That was a lie to try to get sponsors. Nothing more. Right?”

Hunter slumps against the wall, and he looks so much smaller, as though he’s ready to fold in on himself until he isn’t there anymore. A muscle in his jaw twitches and he closes his eyes.

“No,” he whispers.

Casey wonders why this revelation frightens her so. It’s not a normal type of fright; it doesn't shout at her to run and hide, or to defend herself. _You're in over your head now_ , it tells her in an insidious and mocking voice. _You will never be able to kill him. You will never be able to let anyone else._

But maybe she’d always known that.

“Why?” she demands hoarsely. “Why say that out _there_ , instead of…?”

His hand is on his neck again. She wants to yank it down and nail it to his hip, for Christ’s sake.

“I figure if we might not survive, or whatever…” he replies, sounding exhausted. “Carpe diem, I guess? Seize the day, no regrets… all that stuff.”

Casey steps back and takes great interest in the toes of her high heels. Silence weaves itself between them tautly, and she counts the pauses between the beats of her suddenly aching heart.

Hunter clears his throat. “I—”

“No,” Casey interjects, but gently, and she grasps his shoulder in one loose hand. “Don’t. Don’t say anything else. You can tell me all of that when this is over.”

“Casey,” Hunter says, and though he’s smiling, his eyebrows are crawling together into a pained shape. “I don’t think that’s… how this works.”

Casey swallows. It _isn’t_ how this works; they both know that. But as impossible as it is, and as much as her mind is tearing itself in two at the thought of it, she’d rather hear whatever unspoken words are locked down in this earnest idiot’s chest when he wouldn’t only be saying them because he had to.

“There are still a few more interviews,” she hears herself say emptily.

Hunter doesn’t press her.

Jimmy and his sister Jade are interviewed separately—Jimmy’s easy manner of speech and hell-or-high-water protectiveness of Jade charm the viewers immediately, but Jade does not garner a great deal of support; they never like it when their tributes break down and snivel like frightened children (even though that’s exactly what they _are_ , Casey always thinks spitefully). Amanda and Chad are easily forgettable, their interviews smooth but unremarkable, and the Twelves are even more so, but without the “smooth” asset.

In the end, those with the most public support are Ike, Zoe, Vanessa, Brendan, and, to Casey’s shock, Hunter.

“I guess they think I’m cute,” he jokes with a comedic puff of his chest, and Casey permits herself a laugh.

Hodge does not.

“That’s not gonna help you when they’re cutting your throat, though, now is it?” she barks, and that shuts Hunter up for hours.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The night before the Games, Casey can’t sleep. She hadn’t really planned on it to start with, but the way the gaudy penthouse looks with all of the lights out exacerbates her insomnia; she can’t shake the feeling that if she closes her eyes, it will swallow her up.

She pads out of her quarters and her bare feet stick slightly to the polished black hallway. The pajamas the Capitol had provided are indigo silk with patterned gold trim, and they swish around her calves as she walks, hanging loosely from her shoulders and hips.

She comes around the corner to find herself in the main room, and halts when her eyes fall on Hunter, sitting on the floor with his temple resting against the glass and his arms wrapped around his knees. His feet are large and ungainly, and his toes curl periodically.  

Casey approaches him against every shout in her mind not to, because standing beside him will only make the words that he’d spoken in that interview clearer; if he hears her coming, he doesn’t react, blinking slowly at the glittering view.

She comes to a stop next to him, folding her arms so that her elbows are clasped in her hands. She sees herself reflected in the window; her hair is chaotic and unbrushed, and her collarbone seems strangely prominent.

“Hey,” Hunter greets her.

She takes it as permission to sit down. She settles, cross-legged, and slouches so that her elbows rest on her knees.

Hunter’s eyes seem to tear themselves from the far rooftops with great effort, and the face that Casey sees when he looks at her is frightened and lost but still impossibly endearing. His eyes are red around the edges – he’s been crying. He gazes at her with something she cannot identify, a balance between sorrow and devotion that grabs her insides in its fist and clenches them without mercy.

He’s so young, she thinks, even though they’re the same age. He’s so young and he’s so good and he’s so _kind_. It scares her.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks him, bowing her head so that her hair cascades around it and conceals her eyes.

Hunter shifts slightly. “Surprising no one.”

“I couldn’t, either,” Casey mutters, even though it’s pretty obvious. Hunter breathes out a laugh through his round nose.

In one of the windows far below, a light goes out. Casey drops her head against the glass pane. It’s cold. She closes her eyes, focusing on the rhythm of Hunter’s breathing, and curls her fingers around her pants leg.

“If you weren’t here right now,” he inquires after a long while, “I mean, if you were back home… what would you be doing?”

Casey blinks over at him, taken aback. His stare has not faltered, and his chin is now propped up on his raised knees, his half-lidded eyes watching her with painstaking attention.

“Um…” Casey trawls her mind for adequate answers and comes up with none. “I don’t know, actually. I figure I’m here now; might as well pay attention to it.”

“I’d be at the Bloor,” Hunter says, unprompted.

Casey’s brow furrows. “The what?”

“It’s a movie theatre,” he explains. “In my neck of the woods. Pun… maybe intended? They show a lot of old stuff. Stuff the Capitol mostly got rid of, y’know?”

“Sounds cool,” Casey tells him, and it isn’t a lie.

Hunter’s hand goes to his neck and she knows he’s about to say something that will pull the ground out from under her.

“Maybe I oughta take you sometime,” he mumbles, his cheeks flushing, and Casey, though it’s not at all very funny, thinks of her response immediately.

“I don’t think that’s how this works,” she says, an echo of his earlier words behind the interview stage, when their skin had still been hot from the scoop lights.

He cottons on after a moment, and rather than bristling at it, he unravels into a string of laughter, covering his eyes with one hand and grinning without restraint. Casey smiles, too, at the sight, at the sound, and it’s not a good sign.

After they’ve both ebbed back into silence again, Casey chews her lip subtly, contemplating a question that’s been fluttering in the back of her head since their first night in the Capitol. It spills from her, in a rush, partially without her permission.

“What did you mean when you told me not to act like I wasn’t hoping for this?”

Hunter blinks at her owlishly, but then the inquiry seems to catch up to him, and his shoulders droop. He sighs heavily, tangling his fingers in his hair and frowning at the night sky outside, thudding his knee rhythmically against the glass.

“I mean, you were, weren’t you?” he retorts after a moment.

Casey gives him a flat look and he huffs, slumping into defeat. His eyes dart furtively to the open room beside them, and he seems to consider something before crawling slightly forward, toward her side. Casey doesn’t even consider drawing away, but she’s still bewildered when he sits down beside her, as close as he possibly can without actually touching her, and leans hesitantly to her ear.

“Like I said, probably bugged,” he whispers, and Casey only then notices that she’s holding her breath. The heat from his body hovers against the hairs on her arm and raises them. “But I’m not wrong, am I? They killed your parents. They think you’re basically a chess piece. I saw the way you looked at the Reaping; I’m not blind. This is perfect for you, because you’re finally gonna get back at them for it. For everything. You’re gonna go out there show them nobody owns you, and you’re gonna beat them at their own Game. ...Pun _definitely_ intended that time.”

He draws away and Casey gulps as silently as she can.

“I’m with you,” he tells her at a normal volume, and even though it’s obviously a line for the bugs, there’s an undercurrent to it that makes her acutely aware of what he’s really referring to. “All the way. I promise.”

Promises are empty in the Hunger Games, most of the time. Accepting promises almost always leads to accepting a knife in your chest. Her father had always taught her this. You may make promises, and you must always keep them, but you can never expect other people to keep theirs. Not out there in the wild woods, not out there in the bloodbath.

Casey doesn’t know why – she doesn’t know much of anything, and hasn’t, not since she had winced at the sight of the boy beside her stumbling his way onto the stage – but rather than answering him, rather than believing him, she snakes her arms around his shoulders and hugs him, pulling him to her, fisting the fabric of his pajama shirt and resting her chin on his shoulder. He stiffens, but lurches back into functionality with only a few seconds’ pause, and his embrace is careful and bare, as though he fears blemishing her.

“I’ve got you,” she promises him. It doesn't come from anywhere, really. She just says it because it feels like the right thing to say.

“Then the odds are definitely in my favor,” Hunter chuckles. Casey doesn’t hit him for his jocularity. What she had, only a few days ago, seen as pointless and disrespectful now comforts her beyond description – at least someone here still knows how to smile.

She doesn’t know how long they stay like that, wrapped up awkwardly in each other, but she is the first to draw away (always), the cool air of the room chilling her arms when his warmth leaves them. He clears his throat like he feels guilty for making her feel like she had to hold onto him for that long; she tugs at a loose thread in the cuff of her pants. A hundred unspoken things hang in the air, but Casey does not see fit to try cutting any of them down.

“Hey, listen,” he murmurs, and when she glances back up at him again, his eyes are on his hands. In them is what looks to be a small silver pin, but Casey can’t be sure in the dark. After a moment, he extends it to her swiftly, his fingers trembling slightly around it. He looks her straight in the eye, the green sparking with heartfelt conviction. “I want you to have this.”

“I—what?” She closes her agog mouth and immediately shakes her head. “Hunter, I can’t; it’s yours.”

“Actually, it was my mom’s,” he corrects her, and, as she is wont to do whenever a ghostly mention of Hunter’s dead mother flickers by her, Casey slackens with sadness. “It’s a flower, see? A morning glory. She gave it to me before she…”

He breaks off, as he does every time. Casey is starting to suspect that he physically cannot say the words.

He takes her hand in his and sets the pin in her open palm before using his own fingers to curl hers closed over it. The metal is cool and smooth, and the calluses on his hands graze her knuckles.

“I can’t,” she repeats, shaking her head lamely.

“Casey, please, just—” He seems to lose the nerve needed to keep their gazes held, his irises wandering down to their clasped hands. “Just…”

He struggles to find the words. Abandoning the pursuit, he merely squeezes her hand carefully and nods at her, encouragingly, pleadingly. Casey swallows over the rock lodged in her throat and whispers, “Okay.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

The Games are going to be in an arena built to emulate forest. There are caves, rivers, meadows, and a whole lot of trees. The Gamemakers know that their selection of tributes this year are naturally savage; it seems that they want the environment to match them properly.

Casey’s glass tube is small and her black windbreaker brittle. She had hidden Hunter’s pin underneath the fabric and the Gamemakers had not seen it when they had patted her down before sending her down the white hallway to the tubes.

The door whooshes closed around her and she flattens her palms against the surfaces without thinking, feeling her chest start to cave in the longer she’s trapped in it. Against her will, against everything her father had taught her, her heart begins to thud painfully, quickening until she’s sure it will break through her bones.

“Don’t go toward the Cornucopia,” Hodge had told her and Hunter only an hour ago, brandishing one finger. “Let me make myself perfectly fucking clear. Do _not_ go toward the Cornucopia. The second that countdown finishes, you run like hell and you do not stop until you’ve heard at least ten cannons. If I see either of you going anywhere near that thing, I’ll come out there and kill you myself. Now good luck. Chin up. Don’t die.”

All of the tube platforms are equidistant from the Cornucopia. The Capitol puts it there to entice the more gullible tributes, to give the Careers a killing ground so they can shave off the feeble and the useless as early on and as efficiently as possible. There is a reason they call it a bloodbath.

Hunter’s platform is on the opposite end of the grassy Cornucopia field from Casey’s, she realizes with a lurch when the sunshine sprays into her eyes and she adjusts to the brightness of the harsh daylight. Her platform is flanked by those of Irina and Jade. Hunter’s is beside Hisao’s; they exchange a silent look, the communicativeness of which surprises Casey, but then she remembers the last day of training, when Hisao had put his hand on Hunter’s shoulder and calmly said, “If anything happens, find me, and you will be fine.”

Casey catches Hunter’s eye and he gulps, unable to contain a shiver, and she nods slowly to him, once; _you’ll be alright; you’ll be alright; just run, please, run_.

Overhead, the enormous projected numbers tick to fifteen. There is a ring in the air for each of them.

The stillness of the field and the woods surrounding it is, for a moment, perfectly suspended – cicadas hum serenely and leaves whisper a warning, and the enormous silver Cornucopia gleams, waiting, yawning, its mouth framing a cache of weapons and supplies far too few for the twenty-four tributes staring it desperately down.

Casey breathes in quietly through her nose, and back out through her mouth. Her fingers curl. She positions her feet apart, never blinking.

The clear sound of the bell tears the silence apart at the seams, and the summer field with its lupin flowers and distant birds surges into chaos.

Casey sees everything but does not register it. The beat of the events is frenetic and blurry and it all is over within seconds, and she is too busy heading for the bushes to her left, ideal for hiding and for watching and for strategically waiting, to pay very much attention. But out of the corner of her eye she sees Hunter run for the trees without faltering, and his fleet legs carry him so fast and so sure that for a moment, hope leaps into her, that maybe if he runs fast enough no knives will pierce his skin; he is followed closely by the twin from District 4 who had been beside him, but it is the follow of an ally, not a pursuer. Ike is also gone quickly; Casey doesn’t even know where.

Amanda and Chad are stupid; they hurtle clumsily for the Cornucopia, their faces pale with terror. Zoe follows them in a practiced sprint and knocks Amanda away from the knives with an elbow to the face, and her hand grasps the handle of a single ornate silver dagger before plunging it twice, three, four times into Amanda’s stomach until her innards paint the daisies red.

Chad uses the opportunity to flee, his hands clutching a wooden spiked mace. Zoe watches him go silently, the ends of her perfect hair tipped in blood, and, with an arrogant tilt of her chin, she grabs two more throwing knives before vanishing into the trees.

Ian trips in his scramble toward the forest, but Akiko is there in an instant to haul him up and run with his hand crushed in hers. He must have bitten his tongue, because blood dribbles from his mouth. They’re gone, untouched, to the east, but Guillaume is not far behind them, Casey notices with a jerk of her stomach. Megan, the girl from District 11, reaches the Cornucopia and chooses a kukri knife with a leather handle, and her eyes lock onto the two nameless tributes from District 12. Without hesitation, she takes five steps forward, creeping up behind their desperately fumbling shoulders, and slits both of their throats in rapid succession. She is halfway to the trees before the second of them even goes still.

Fortunato, the other Eleven, had not even considered the Cornucopia; weaponless and alone, he had jogged in the opposite direction. Irina reaches the weapons cache and leaps over the corpses of the two Twelves, grabbing the bow in one hand and a quiver in the other. She does not leave the field as all those before her had, however—she fastens the quiver to her back and raises the bow, nocking an arrow fluidly and aiming toward the other tributes foolish enough to approach her.

The first arrow skewers Hannah through the eye. She falls. The second catches Andres in the throat and he, too, crumples. The other tributes scatter into terrified retreat—Maggie and Esi together, southward, though Esi is sobbing with a strange, uncanny anguish, eyes not leaving Hannah's body; the couple from 8, hands clasped, to the west—and Irina watches them idly like a cheetah choosing which gazelle to rip apart.

She seems to make a decision, nocking another arrow and settling her eyes steadily on the red-haired girl from District 10.

Jimmy, her brother, notices before she does—she had stumbled on her way to the trees and is on all fours with her back turned. Without hesitating, without even blinking, he bounds into the trajectory of the arrow just as Irina fires it, and it buries itself directly into his heart.

He hits the ground with his eyes wide open. Jade gives a start, whirling, and the next sound that fills the bloodied field is an unearthly scream so raw and tortured and _long_ that it could barely be considered human. Irina seems impressed by the sacrifice, and so she lowers her bow, but before she leaves, she makes sure that Jade’s round eyes meet hers, and she makes sure to smile.

“You _bitch_!” Jade howls, but her legs seem to be failing her, for she does not stand. “You fucking _bitch_ ; I’ll _kill_ you, _I’ll kill you_ , _I’ll **kill** you_ —!”

“You are welcome to try, girl,” Irina tells her with great amusement, and then, seeming bored of the massacre, she leaves, grabbing a backpack full of food on her way.

Jade does not move, doubled over her brother’s corpse and sobbing, her fingers gripping his shirt, whimpering his name over and over and over. She is the last one left in the field—all of the others have gone. Tentatively, Casey steps out from the bushes, every step taken with great caution, but Jade does not even react. She is seized up with grief.

Casey slips to the Cornucopia in silence, and the sounds of the nature around them start slowly to return to the sickening silence of the clearing. The weapons remaining are a throwing axe, a spear, a sickle, a crossbow, and a stack of bricks. All of the food supplies are gone, but one survival kit remains, containing a sleeping bag, a flask of water purifier, matches, and medicine. Casey reaches out to take it, but falters, her eyes wandering back to Jade, who has not moved.

She takes the crossbow.

Words wrestle in her throat and she opens her mouth as if to speak to the squalling girl, as if to offer some condolences, some comfort, but nothing substantial comes of it. She gulps and it hurts her dry throat and she calls out:

“You—You should take something and go. I’m... I’ll leave the backpack, okay?”

She does not wait for an answer or a reaction. Her legs carry her in a jog toward the woods, and the musky stench of hot blood in the air leaves her, replaced by bay laurels and honeysuckle.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Casey runs until her legs start to scream with exertion, until her hair sticks to her forehead and her lungs are ablaze. The arena is humid and the air is thick; her fingers are sweaty around the grip of the crossbow. If she listens, she can hear unidentifiable cries of pain and terror from all directions and distances.

Finally, unable to carry on, she stumbles to a halt by a looming pine, bracing herself against it by one hand. Startling her, a cannon booms through the afternoon, sending the birds overhead scattering. Another follows almost immediately.

Her eyes search the sky overhead, and after a moment, two holographic screens appear, and Casey’s heart returns to her chest when she registers in a blink that neither of the faces on them have red hair or too big of a nose.

On the left is Chad, Amanda’s companion from District 9; on the right, she realizes with a dull pang of pity, is Vanessa’s lover, Brendan.

The screens switch to footage of their deaths. The Capitol always plays every tribute’s final moments, the more gruesome the better, to frighten those still standing into desperation. Casey should look away, she knows; she shouldn’t play into the same voyeurism that she has despised all her life, but it is Chad’s that catches her frozen attention.

He’s advancing on Hunter, laughing brokenly and madly, his mace raised over his shoulder, and Hunter is on the ground, his ankles caught in a snare, his hands scrambling uselessly at the dead leaves on the soil. At the last moment, Zoe comes striding onto the camera, seemingly out of nowhere, with colder eyes than Casey has ever seen, and after a single silver flash, Chad is coughing up blood and red is staining the beautiful Zoe’s smooth, steady hands.

She turns to Hunter, her expression unreadable.

“Don’t touch him,” Casey hears herself whispering. “Don’t fucking _touch him_ —”

Perhaps Zoe hears her. Either way, she wipes the blade off on her pants once, twice, and then she darts off the way she had come. The screen goes black.

Brendan is back at the Cornucopia on his screen, his hands fumbling desperately at the sacks that had been labeled as containing medicine. He is unaware of Megan advancing on him, knife raised.

His hands find the bottle he’s looking for and his face splits into an exhilarated smile, and Casey thinks she sees his joyfully relieved lips form around Vanessa’s name as he whirls back around to run back to her.

Instead Megan’s knife cleaves itself through his forehead. Whatever he had been about to shout to Vanessa, he does not say. He twitches, eyes rolling back, and she covers his face with her hand to hold him still while she jimmies the knife back out.

Somewhere, where the trees are too thick for sunlight, Casey hears a girl’s broken scream.

She keeps running.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There are four rivers webbed throughout the arena. Casey finds one of them within what feels like about an hour, just in time for another cannon to go off.

It’s Esi, District 6’s clever survivor. The video is short: she is kneeling at a river of her own to sip water from her hands when Guillaume appears behind her and snaps her neck.

When the screen vanishes again, Casey sees a parachute pass by, drifting toward a point straight ahead of her. Someone is close by – someone with a sponsor and, more importantly, already the need for assistance from one.  

She drinks her fill of the water and waits twenty minutes against a tree trunk to see if it will have any averse effects on her health, and she feels no murmurs of incoming pain, so she pushes off of the bark and continues on, thankful that she still has yet to aim her crossbow. She does not allow herself to wonder where Hunter is; at that moment, she confesses that she is glad the screens are there – every time the face she sees is not his, the strength seems to return to her legs.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The Gamemakers grow bored of the daylight very quickly. They must think they’re making it too easy for them. Either way, very suddenly, the sunny clarity of the forest plunges into total darkness.

Casey freezes in her tracks. Her stomach is roaring with hunger and her calves feel cut open from exertion. No cannons have gone off for a while, which is strange; that must be why the Gamemakers decided to throw a wrench in the simplicity of the environment, to make things go a little faster.

Then the rain starts.

It comes after a single strike of thunder, torrenting down onto the arena without mercy. It’s thick and soaking and heavy, and Casey uselessly raises an arm over her head to try to shield herself, blinking the water out of her eyes as she desperately scans the landscape for shelter.

She thinks she sees a cave several yards away, hewn into the side of a rock formation, and so she jogs to it, ignoring the insatiable gurgling in her gut. Her feet splash to a stop in the mud at the opening of the cavern, and she tightens her grip around the crossbow, raising it steadily before edging, slowly, inside.

It’s utterly black, and she isn’t sure how deep it is. Somehow, over the rattling of the rain, she hears a noise, and freezes.

It’s sniffling. Someone is in there with her, and that someone is crying.

Casey swiftly raises the crossbow and aims it in the direction of the sound, breathing heavily. Lightning flashes, and, for a brief moment, the entire cave is illuminated, and Casey’s eyes lock onto a girl’s form curled up sideways on the ground, crowned in red hair.  

She lowers the weapon.

“Jade?” she ventures cautiously. Her eyes have begun to adjust to the darkness.  

“Just kill me,” Jade whimpers. Her freckled face is dirty, but streaked with tears. “Please. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Casey approaches her with measured carefulness, setting the crossbow against the damp cave wall before kneeling in the dirt beside Jade’s prone body.

She shouldn’t be doing this. She shouldn’t want to hug this girl until her tears stop.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” she says.

“As fucking if,” Jade spits back. “One less tribute in your way, isn’t he?”

“That’s not how I see things,” Casey tells her with a shake of her head.

“That’s how you’re— _we’re_ supposed to.” Jade hiccups, her fingers curling. “Look, if you’re just trying to do the psychological manipulation thing so it’ll be easier to bump me off, just get it over with, all right?”

“I’m _not_ ,” Casey insists, but Jade doesn’t seem to hear her.

“I want to go home. Oh, God, what am I gonna tell my dad? No… who am I fucking kidding; there’s no way I’m winning this.” She closes her eyes tightly and clasps her hands together as if in prayer. Her voice plunges into a frantic whisper. “Daddy, I’m sorry; I’m so sorry…”

“I’m sure he’s very proud of you,” Casey tries to comfort her, though the words of false hope sour her teeth.

“Proud?” Jade echoes. “ _Proud_?”

At last, she sits up, pushing herself off of the ground with her palms flat, and the lightning fills the cave with brightness again for an instant. Her expression is screwed up with imminent rage.

“Why would he be proud?!” she shouts, throwing her arms out. “Why would he be proud of me for being so fucking _stupid_ that Jimmy went and did what he did? You think it’d make anybody’s dad proud to see his daughter run away to cry somewhere, instead of _fighting_? Instead of fucking _doing something_?!”

“I’m sorry,” Casey says quietly. In the dimness, she can see Jade’s brown eyes riveting onto her with something that is not spite but resignation.

“We’re not all heroes here, all right, Casey?” she rasps.

“I never said I was,” Casey protests, frowning, but Jade snorts, slumping back against the stone wall and pushing her ratty hair out of her face.

“Then what’d you leave me the backpack for?” she demands. “You could’ve taken it for yourself; I wasn’t about to stop you. You could’ve left me out there without anything, but you didn’t. Why?”

Casey draws her knees up, snaking her arms around them. The rain pelts the ground outside in the silence, and thunder rolls distantly.

“I try to avoid playing by their rules,” she finally answers. She knows that the cameras are picking all of this up, and that the Capitol and the Gamemakers are likely not looking upon it with approval, and that they will make things harder for her now, now that she has made her defiance clear.

“Wow,” Jade sighs out. Casey glances over at her knees; they’re both starting to scab over. Her fingernails have been torn down to nothing. “Well… thanks, I guess.”

She looks up and meets Casey’s eye, biting her lip. Casey wonders if she herself looks half as filthy and ennervated as the other girl does. She hopes so.

“Maybe from here on out, we could—” Jade swallows, scratching her upper arm. “Look out for each other.”

The Gamemakers had recommended making alliances many times, not because they held any kind of solidity or promise in the arena, but because they made things “interesting.” Another thing the Capitol loves besides tragic romance is backstabbing. Literal or figurative. There is little assurance in this one, because the Hunger Games can only have one victor, and it will be impossible to keep each other alive, but the offer is still genuine, and Casey thinks, pityingly, that this girl does not belong here, that she never belongs in a place like this. She shares that with Hunter.

Something nudges sharply at Casey’s heart. _Hunter_.

“Yeah,” she hears herself murmur, and she gives Jade a sleepy smile, proffering a hand. “Maybe we could.”

Jade takes it. Her hands have seen work, Casey can tell instantly; they’re callused and firm, and her grip is strong.

“I saw the other guy from your district,” Jade reveals after their palms part. “Just a little while ago.”

“Where?” Casey demands immediately, hating how urgent her voice sounds. There is something in Jade’s warm eyes that is worrisomely knowing.

“I’m not sure – a half-mile east? By the big willow,” Jade replies. “He was with one of the guys from District Four.” She pauses, seeming to consider something. “His leg was bleeding pretty bad. He needed medicine, so… I threw them the tube in my backpack and ran.”

Casey releases a breath. “Thank you.”

Jade shrugs and tries to pass it off as nonchalant, but her lips are quirked with bashful pride.

“His sponsors would’ve sent him some eventually even if I hadn’t,” she dismisses. She glances over at Casey curiously. “Are you guys really… I mean, you know. Is what he said in the interview true?”

Casey contemplates avoiding the question. The more she reveals about her relationship with Hunter, the more ammunition the Gamemakers will have for trying to create drama – the more reason they’ll have to set off a land mine under his feet, just to see how she handles it.

But there’s something about Jade when she isn’t crying. Something that makes Casey wish, wish so hard that it hurts, that they were meeting under different circumstances so they could braid each other’s hair and laugh at each other’s stupid jokes.

“Well…” She fidgets slightly. The water on the cave wall has soaked through the back of her shirt. “As far as I know, yeah, he wasn’t lying to Dagney.”  

“So he loves you,” Jade says. “But…”

“But…?” Casey prompts her when she doesn’t finish.

Jade tucks some hair behind her ear. “But… you don’t love _him_.”

“I…” Casey makes a quiet tutting sound and scrubs her hands over her face, sighing muffledly into them. “I can’t think about that right now. Not here.”

She’s expecting Jade to press her, to ask her why not. But she doesn’t. She hums pensively and stretches her legs, knocking the toes of her muddy sneakers together and tapping her knees with her palms.

“That makes sense,” she concedes.

Just then, a cannon sounds off. Jade yelps at the sound and jumps, gripping Casey’s windbreaker sleeve on instinct.  

“Stay here,” Casey orders before crawling to the mouth of the cave, squinting skyward through the downpour. It’s hard to see, but after a moment, she recognizes the projected face on the screen: Maggie, Hannah’s friend.

The footage shows her talking to Hunter in a dark clearing, the hood of her windbreaker concealing her face. His jacket is gone, and he’s shivering in his wet and clinging t-shirt, but he’s smiling through his chattering teeth, nodding periodically.

There’s a shadow that fleetly passes, and suddenly, Maggie coughs up red and collapses face-down into the mud. One of Zoe’s throwing knives protrudes from her back. Hunter stumbles backwards, his hands flying to his mouth as if to withhold vomit. He turns clumsily and runs.

Well after he’s gone, Zoe steps out of the shadows and tugs the knife from Maggie’s body, holding it out under the rain to clean it.

“Who was it?” Jade calls out in a dull voice.

Casey shakes her head, though she doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s because Zoe has had two chances to kill Hunter where he stands and has passed up on them both, and Careers don’t just _do_ that.

“It was the other Five,” she answers.

Jade sighs. Casey creeps back into the cavern, the dirt squelching under her hands, and sits beside Jade again.

“Hey,” she offers after a time. “If you wanna get some sleep… I can keep watch.”

Jade frowns skeptically at her.

“I know we just made a pact, and all, but I’m not _that_ stupid,” she retorts. Casey chuckles.

“Really, I won’t do anything,” she vows. To further her case, she adds, “Trust me, if I _do_ wind up having to kill somebody here, I’m at least going to do it honorably; none of that underhanded bullshit.”

“I… guess I can respect that?” Jade replies, sounding the opposite of convinced. The way she exhales, though, alerts Casey to her capitulation. “Whatever. Even if you do kill me, it’s not like it’ll make any difference.”

“Trust me, you dying would make a lot of difference,” Casey assures her as fiercely as she can.

Jade rolls her eyes. “No offense, Casey, but seriously, shut up. You don’t even know me.”

“Well, we’re off to a start, aren’t we?” Casey ripostes.

“Hm,” Jade grunts back noncommittally, but she lies down on her side, curling up and shifting for a few seconds before going still.

The rain sounds like it may be letting up, but Casey doubts it. She watches the indistinct opposite wall with impartial eyes, and she does not once feel tired.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The cannon cracks through the rain with especially fearsome volume, and Jade awakens with a scream of, “ _Mom, look out_!”

Casey’s head whips around toward her and a fierce order to be quiet is poised in her throat, but she has already calmed, panting and wide-eyed but silent. Casey puts a hand on her shoulder and she swallows, nodding her wellness, and they both sidle to the opening without speaking to each other.

Casey is startled at the face that appears this time. She had been sure that the hollow-cheeked girl whose eerie gaze is frozen on it would last at least until the final eight.

“Oh my God,” Jade breathes. Part of her, a part that Casey does not see fit to inquire about, sounds almost regretful. “A-Already?”

The two of them watch as the screen plays out Megan’s final moments. She has managed to sneak up on Akiko – no large feat, to be fair – and she is advancing on Akiko with her dagger poised and her eyes as vacant as ever.

Akiko must have heard her coming, because she whirls around, terror rising on her face. Megan presses a finger to her own lips and Akiko shakes her head mutely, backed up against a tree.

Megan drives the dagger into her stomach and starts to drag it sideways, but before she can finish the job, a throwing knife burrows itself to the hilt into her shoulder.

She pulls the knife out of Akiko, who crumples, and lurches around. Zoe is standing in the clearing now, one glinting knife in hand. Her cheeks have seemed to grow more gaunt and her eyes more savage since the Cornucopia; her hair is wild and untamed, and her face is splattered with blood that is almost certainly not her own.

Megan tilts her head curiously before reaching over her shoulder and shucking off the knife. She tosses it back to Zoe, who catches it in her other hand. Megan steps to the side, and Zoe mirrors her until they are circling each other like intrigued jungle cats with their claws out.

Zoe is the one who lunges first, her face calm and calculating. She buries one knife in Megan’s collarbone and, in turn, Megan swings her arm up and slices a gash across Zoe’s pretty cheek. They wrestle and claw at each other and Akiko, still barely alive, tries to push herself up by her feet, her hand failing at stemming the gushing flow from her open gut.

Suddenly, it’s over. Zoe’s hand is gripping the handle of the other throwing knife, which protrudes from Megan’s neck. After two beats, she jerks it back out, and Megan falls to the ground, unmoving.

She must think that finishing off Akiko is not worth her time, stalking onwards. Just after she has left the frame, a skinny body comes flailing in from the uppermost corner, crashing to its knees beside Akiko.

It’s Ian. He’s crying. The feed cuts to black.

“I feel sorry for them,” Jade whispers. “I heard them talking during training once. He kept dropping all these hints about wanting to get his first kiss before he dies. She said she’d only give it to him if he lived.”

“Doesn’t look like that’s gonna work out,” Casey sighs out.

She and Jade agree to split up after that. They share some of the jerky from Jade’s backpack, and Casey stuffs hers down ravenously and gratefully. Jade laughs.

Before Casey slips back out into the storm, she notices, out of the corner of her eye, that Jade had gotten a weapon from the Cornucopia, too – the spear. Casey remembers seeing Jade practice with it in the training room, even though her brother had been the more skilled of the two of them by far.

“I’m going to use it on someone special,” Jade tells her, gripping it between her grubby hands, and there is a dark edge to her voice now that disconcerts Casey more than it should. She lingers, suddenly overcome with a constricting guilt at the thought of leaving this girl alone, but Jade seems to notice it, giving her a sad little smile. “Go on. If anything happens… you’ll find me.”

 _Probably dead_ , Casey thinks, but she doesn’t say it out loud.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn’t know if, when the rain ebbs and the daylight returns, a night has actually passed or the Gamemakers feel like switching things up again. In any case, it smells like fresh early morning, and if Casey closes her eyes, she can hear her father calling for her to hurry home and box with her old man before it gets too hot out.

She hears a twig snap behind her and immediately breaks into a run. It doesn’t matter who or what it is, only that it definitely is there to kill her.

Her legs carry her in a dash through the thickening trees and she bursts through a cluster of them to find herself a few yards away from a riverbank. Ignoring it, she turns sharply around a tall, protruding rock, and she cranes her head over her shoulder to see if she’s still being followed. When she sees nothing, she turns it back, and just as it is straight again, she crashes headlong into another person.

Their foreheads crack together and they both let out identical, simultaneous curse words at the sharp pain before tumbling. Casey hits the leaf-strewn ground and the wind is knocked from her; through the reacting tears blurring her vision, she lifts her crossbow and aims it ineptly in front of her.

“ _Casey_?” Hunter exclaims.

Casey’s heart stutters to a stop. There he is, right in front of her, one hand clutching his forehead and the other frozen halfway toward her, his perfect green eyes wide, his face spasming into an unfettered, joyful smile.

“Hunter,” she chokes out, and she vaults herself forward, cuffing him around the shoulders in a hug and knocking him down. An “ _oof_ ” bursts out of him, but he’s clinging back in an instant, squeezing her around the middle and burying his face in her gnarled hair.

“Jesus, I—” he pants out. “I didn’t think we’d—”

“I kept seeing you on the screens,” she interjects. “I was so—”

“—No, no, I’ve been with Hisao; he’s been—”

“—I saw it when Zoe almost—”

“—Really great, but he had to go find his brother—”

“—You’re okay,” Casey whispers, and they both finally stop babbling over each other, and she tightens her grip on him, closing her eyes tightly. “I’ve been worried sick.”

“Well, shucks,” Hunter says in mock bashfulness, and Casey lets go of him, bracing herself with her hands on his chest. He’s smiling goofily up at her, and she blows out an exasperated and relieved breath, resisting the temptation to drop her forehead onto his chest and stay there.

They stare at each other for a long moment. He’s sprawled out under her, sweaty and smeared with dried mud, but grinning. Her knees press into the dirt at either side of him. She can feel his whole body move against her when he breathes. After a moment, his cheeks start to redden, and Casey takes it as a sign to clamber off of him.

He coughs when he stands, brushing himself off. Casey watches the area around them vigilantly, picking up her crossbow and pushing her hair back.

“So, uh…” Hunter ventures. “You feel like letting me join your party for a while?”

Casey chuckles through her nose. “Sure. But stay close.”

“Sure thing, boss,” he agrees, giving her two thumbs up. “Where’re we headed?”

“I don’t know,” Casey admits. “Anywhere we can avoid having to kill somebody a little longer, I guess.”

“Trying to just wait ’em all out, huh?” Hunter asks, adjusting the backpack strap on his shoulder. “That’s cool. Very noble.”

Casey jerks her head toward the river. “Come on. Let’s cross.”

“Ah. Yeah, great, awesome,” Hunter says. “My leg’ll definitely appreciate that.”

Casey remembers what Jade had said, about his injury. Her eyes dart to him as they both trudge toward the water, and she sees that he’s limping. His pants leg is torn and bloodied.

“Who did it?” she asks him.

“That—what’s-her-face. The Russian girl,” Hunter explains with a wave of his hand. “Grazed me with an arrow. But it’s fine; Hisao bandaged it. That girl from District 10, the one whose brother died? She chucked some medicine at us and then made a break for it. Like, I probably would’ve had to cut my leg off without it. I don't know how I'll ever thank her, but... it was still pretty weird.”

Casey smiles softly and privately. She and Hunter wade into the cold water of the river and gasp at the temperature, and they both swim a bit awkwardly across it, splashing and sputtering but still moving. Hunter’s not the greatest swimmer, his dog paddle making a great deal of noise, but they still make it to the opposite shore, climbing up it in tandem.

“How long d’you think it’ll be before they make it night again?” Hunter asks her conversationally about ten minutes later, when they’re well into the forested paths once more. Birds chirrup overhead and the sun beats down through the leaves.

Casey opens her mouth to answer, but she stops in her tracks and throws out a hand to halt Hunter when she sees a leg sprawled out on the ground from behind a bush of nightlock berries. Hunter starts to question her, but then he sees it, too, and lets out a quiet, “Oh.”

They both approach it carefully, Hunter one step behind Casey’s still-poised arm. She tightens her grasp readily on the handle of the crossbow, but when they round the edge of the bush, she loosens again, as it’s clear she will not need it.

Vanessa is lying spread-eagled at the foot of the bush, her hair fanned out underneath her, her soft lips and the tips of her stiff fingers painted with nightlock blue. Her eyes are still open, but they’re half-lidded and cloudy.

Something tells Casey that she hadn't eaten the berries by accident.

“Let’s go,” Casey whispers, and they continue on.

It’s strange. She hadn’t even heard a cannon. Maybe she's deaf to them now.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Hunter is halfway through telling her about the flowers his mother used to grow in the garden when the artificial night descends again. They’ve been walking for a couple of hours, and Casey’s feet are starting to feel swollen. They had shared the last of the nuts in Hunter’s backpack a while ago, but Casey’s stomach is still begging fiercely for better fortification and her vision is starting to tilt.

Hunter’s story trails into nothing and they both rear their heads back together to stare at the starry sky, but at least there _are_ stars to begin with.

“No rain this time,” Casey idly observes.

“Thank you, universe,” Hunter mutters. “You think we should try to find someplace to wait this out?”

Casey doesn’t hear the last part. She throws up a hand to silence him and he shuts his mouth immediately, and in the open air, Casey confirms the existence of the sound that had caught her attention – quiet sobbing, a few feet to their right, in a clearing beyond a line of junipers.

“Casey,” Hunter hisses, an unspoken plea for them to keep going, but she does not heed him, wandering toward the source of the sound. He follows her without hesitation, and they both crouch at the edge of the field. Casey tugs a bough of juniper down to get a better view.

Her stomach sinks. It’s Ian and Akiko. She looks like she’s just fallen down and he’s barely caught her, and he is currently positioning her so that she’s propped up against him as he kneels, snuffling pitifully.

“We have to keep going,” he blubbers.

“Shut up, Ian; I’m tired,” she mumbles back. “I’m… I’m so tired…”

Casey and Hunter both watch, utterly still, as Ian brushes Akiko’s hair from her face and snivels onto her, his tears splattering down on her cheeks. Blood bubbles on her lips and her entire shirt is crimson now, and she’s pale – _so pale_ , too pale.

“Fuck, Akiko, come on,” Ian whimpers. He’s an ugly crier, all snot and a contorted face and splotchy cheeks. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Get up. This shit doesn’t _happen_ to you, Akiko; you were supposed to fucking _win_.”

“C-Can’t always get what you want, dummy,” Akiko breathes. She’s trying to lift a hand up to touch his face, trying to caress him with her sticky red fingers, but she’s too weak; her wrist flops uselessly onto the grass after every try. “Nngh… I’m cold…”

Ian responds by stooping over her and covering her body with his, his arms scrabbling at her chest to hold her more tightly against his bent knees, his forehead dropping to rest between her breasts. He’s palpitating with sobs, but they’re dry and ravaged – all of his tears are spent.

“Please don’t leave me, Akiko,” he wheezes, _begs_. Finally, Akiko’s hand finds his arm, her fingers barely touching it in a ghost of a comforting gesture. “Fuck. _Fuck_. You p-promised me. Don’t leave me out here all alone; please, please, _please_ —”

“Ian…” Akiko’s voice is small now, so small, so bare. Ian withdraws, his hands framing her face, trembling with need and terror; they are hands that have, for a long time, yearned to touch her, but the fulfillment of this want is all wrong. Akiko smiles at him, serenely, like she thinks he’s funny. “D-Don’t be such a crybaby. It’s okay. I have faith. I have faith…”

“No,” Ian whines, but her eyes have already emptied, sliding with glassy blindness to the sky overhead. “No, no – Akiko? Akiko! _Fuck_! Akiko, no, no, _no_ , _Christ_ ; come on— _come on_! _AKIKO_!”

His sobs are high-pitched and wordless, dragged out of his thin and fragile body each for several seconds too long. The agony fills the spaces between the trees, and he curls over her again, clutching her limp body to his and rocking back and forth, wailing out her name again and again, cursing, weeping, screaming.

It is the only thing Casey has ever heard that seems louder than the cannon. Akiko’s mischievously smiling picture from the first day of training fills the sky overhead, but now her face is blanched and bloodied and her eyes are eerily void, and Casey would never have known that sounds of such powerful rage and suffering could come from a body as meager as Ian’s; her bones are twisting with each heave of the tortured bellows and with the firm knowledge of what they mean.

And then she hears a howl.

Hunter grabs her arm in a vice grip in an instant. It shakes with panic.

The Gamemakers have sent out the wolves. They are hulking dogs that travel in hungry packs, genetically engineered monstrosities whose only aim is to tear and rip and consume. Casey has seen them eat tributes alive before, on the tiny television screen at her home; it had been brutal and she had thrown up.

“We have to go,” Hunter whispers. “Casey, _right now_.”

Ian hears him.

There is a moment – an impossibly still, clear moment – when Ian’s eyes lock into both Casey’s and Hunter’s and his previously agonized face loosens until it is utterly devoid of livelihood. Casey knows he will not attack them. He is weaponless and exhausted.

The wolves are getting closer.

“They won’t go for her, yeah?” he asks in a hoarse voice. “She’s already dead, so they won’t…”

Casey shakes her head silently to affirm his hope. He nods once, his eyes sliding back down to the limp form of his partner, and, with painstaking care, he traces her right eyebrow with a single finger, his whole body softening. Casey can’t help feeling as though the action is not something meant for her eyes or anyone else’s.

“She’s going to kill me for this,” he whispers.

“Casey,” Hunter implores her again, tugging at her arm.

Casey’s torso turns before her head does. Even as Hunter runs with her hand in his, she does not look ahead of her – she watches, fixated, blank, as the wolves converge on the unmoving boy from District 3 and their jaws find the skinny limbs that everyone had mocked.

He doesn’t make a sound.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Casey hears the anguished roar of rage from far off in the dark trees before the cannon fires. Overhead, a screen illuminates: On it is the face of one of the District 4 twins. She does not know which.

Hunter takes one look and chokes quietly, whispering, “No, shit, man; not you… not you…”

It’s Hisao.

Casey reaches over and grips Hunter’s hand, not knowing what else to do. She doesn’t want to watch the video feed, but he stays rooted in place, and she doesn’t want to let go of him, either, so she’s forced to stay with him. The footage is short and hard to see, but Hisao is jogging toward his brother, Jun, calling out to him, and the bare beginnings of an uncharacteristic smile on Jun’s face do not have long to grow before an arrow has flown from the trees and pierced Hisao’s stomach.

When he trips and falls, he lands on it, and the shaft is shoved in deeper. Jun doesn’t reach him before he hits the ground, and his legs seem to give out on him before he can, so that he stumbles forward on his knees the rest of the way, reaching toward his brother’s body but halting his hand without touching him.

Casey glimpses Irina’s face in the trees off to the side of the frame—she looks shocked.

The brother who never smiles balls his fists into the fabric of his pants and rears his head to the sky, screaming wordlessly. There is no sound in the videos, so it’s utterly silent, but Casey had heard it earlier—the whole world had heard it earlier—so she needs no auditory aid.

Before the video ends, another cannon sounds. Casey, not having expected it, jumps, and Hunter’s hand braces her at the small of her back.

They do not need to show another face—Casey realizes, with a swiftly dropping stomach, that Guillaume is walking toward Jun from behind, his arms hanging at his sides. There are tears in his eyes that startle her.

He’s not being stealthy, and there’s no way that Jun doesn’t hear him approach. Guillaume’s eyebrows wrestle together with a grief that echoes heartbreak, and he grabs Jun’s head before snapping it to the side and breaking his neck.

He bends down over Hisao’s corpse and pets his hair twice, and then he crouches fully and kisses the crown of his head. Sharply, swiftly, he lifts his chin back up and looks straight at the camera, and his eyes are ablaze with wrath and misery.

 _You will pay_ , the look promises. Casey doesn’t even realize she’s walking again until she trips over a protruding root, but she doesn’t fall, because Hunter catches her elbow and hoists her back up.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s Zoe who gets the surviving tribute from District 11. Fortunato is drinking from a stream when she finds him, and it’s so fast, and so casual; she crouches behind him and yanks his head back and cuts his throat open. He falls into the bank and crimson clouds the clear water, and she leaves him there without a second glance, as though she’s just flattened an ant with her thumb.

“He never hurt anybody,” Hunter murmurs. “Jesus.”

Casey wonders if he’d been praying in the moments before. It had seemed, from what little she’d seen of him, that he was always praying. She hopes so. She hopes he had thought of Eden.

They’re both sitting on boulders, because Hunter’s leg had been beginning to smart. They don’t have any clean bandages, so the gauze around his calf is an ugly red that they cannot change.

“I saw him,” Hunter confesses, and Casey raises her eyebrows. “After Hisao and I split up, I mean. He had a bunch of fruit from one of the food packs. He gave me a melon slice. It was his last one.”

Casey snorts a little wryly. That makes two times that Hunter has received gifts from other tributes, instead of mortal wounds. Leave it to him to make friends during the Hunger Games.

“It was his last one,” he repeats quietly, his face cast into a frown, and Casey opens her mouth to try to offer some adequate response, but the sound of a shout cuts her off.

“ _LET HER GO!_ ”

It’s loud and furious, and the last of it echoes twice through the trees. Moments after, a cannon fires.

Casey’s eyes slide to the screen in the sky automatically. She gasps.

“Guillaume?” Hunter breathes, apparently as shocked as she is.

Casey hears another voice in the distance. She recognizes it in an instant as Jade’s, and her bewilderment grows.

“Ike—holy shit, you did it,” Jade exclaims. Even from so far away, Casey can hear elation in her tone. “Th-Thanks.”

“My reputation lies in _tatters_ , I hope you know,” Ike drawls back.

Wind tousles the branches and drowns out any further exchanges, and in the footage overheard, Guillaume grabs Jade in a headlock, apparently to strangle her, and Ike suddenly leaps at him, an animal glint to his eyes and a shard of sharpened glass in his hand. Casey wonders where he got it—maybe from one of the food boxes in the survival kits.

He stabs Guillaume six times, all up and down his side, until the strong and frightening boy collapses, his body curling in on itself as the life seeps out of it. Just before the video cuts to black, Casey sees Jade stand perfectly still for a moment before flinging her arms around Ike’s neck in a heedless embrace.

“Wow,” Hunter says beside her. “That’s, uh… new.”

Honestly, Casey couldn’t have said it better herself.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Hunter insists on going out to find some wood for a fire, because the Gamemakers are making the arena colder and it doesn’t look like they’ll be bringing back the sun anytime soon. Casey wants to follow him, but he insists they’ll work faster if they go separately, which is about the dumbest thing someone can suggest in a place like this, but he dashes her doubts relatively quickly.

“We’ll just whistle every few minutes to let each other know we’re safe,” he tells her. “Here, like this—”

He whistles out a short and ominous-sounding tune that’s almost a funeral march. Casey wrinkles her nose.

“What the hell is that supposed to be?” she demands.

Hunter pinches the bridge of his nose and mutters, “Star Wars, Casey; I have _got_ to get you to the Bloor; Jesus Christ…”  

So now, here she is, treading carefully over the strewn leaves and picking up any considerable twigs she can find. She’s heard Hunter’s melody twice now, and she’s whistled it back.

She stops, her eyes going out of focus with thought. She hadn’t even considered correcting him about his insistence to get her to the movie theatre he kept talking about; she has forgotten, several times, the truth of how this is all going to end. Either he’s going to die, or they both are, or she is, and she does not intend to, which does not bode well for him.

She finds herself thinking of her parents, of watching her father kiss her mother’s temple until the worry lines lessened on her face, of the way the light from the bonfires would dance across the treetops at night and she would vow a lot of impossible things to no one in particular. She’s glad, for the first time, that they are no longer here, that they cannot see her warring with herself over this.

She tells herself that she should just run now, or, if she is truly aiming to win, she should go back to where Hunter had left and finally fire her crossbow straight between his unguarded eyes, the ones that she has caught gazing at her with more love than she knows she can afford to accept now. And maybe if things had just been _different_ , maybe if he had just been a classmate or the boy who had dropped off the milk in the mornings, she _could_ afford it. She doesn’t know what makes her sadder.

Cutting her out of her thoughts, she hears a sudden noise cut through the biting air – Hunter, shouting out a terrified, “Holy shit, please, no!”

The wood falls from her arms and she runs, runs as fast as her cramping legs can carry her, arms pumping, breath coming out in gasps.

“I’m sorry,” someone is saying, aloof and calculating. “You seemed like a nice enough kid, so I’ve been holding off on you. Maybe hoping somebody else would do it. But it’s down to the final six now, Hunter; I have to do this.”

Casey trips and hits the ground, but she scrabbles back up in an instant, her legs slipping on the leaves.

“W-Why?” Hunter’s voice stammers back. “Why would you _ever_ have to do something like this? They don’t own you, Zoe; you’re not— _please_ … I d-don’t want—”

“Don’t want to what? To die?” Casey’s ears are ringing. “Come on. At least do me the favor of not lying to my face. Anyway, that’s how the story ends for all of us around these parts, kid. Maybe Little Miss Virtuous has been tricking you into thinking different, but there’s no getting around it anymore. Once you accept it, it gets easier. Trust me. I mean, end of the day, we’re all just victims of our own surroundings. Right?”

“Zoe,” Hunter whimpers. “ _Please_ …”

“Shh,” Zoe whispers. “Close your eyes. This isn’t gonna hurt.”

The trees part, and Casey sees them. She aims her hurtling body toward Zoe, screaming out a battle cry, but before she can reach her, before she can tackle her away from Hunter’s cowering form, she hears the pluck of a bowstring and the high whoosh of an arrow through the air. Then, sharply, a sickening squelching noise.

Blood erupts from Zoe’s mouth and her eyes go wide. The arrow skewers her completely, from her back straight through her heart and out her left breast. She falls facedown at Hunter’s feet and does not get up again.

Casey staggers to a halt. Hunter’s back is flat against a tree trunk, and his face is splattered in flecks of Zoe’s blood. He’s staring with bulging, terrified eyes straight ahead of him, where Zoe had been only a moment before. His mouth is agape, but after a second, it turns down into a grimace of pain and frustration and something that Casey shouldn't recognize as _regret_ , of all things.

Out of the forest, Irina steps into view, another arrow already nocked in her raised bow. Her face is scrunched up in a petulant cross between fury and heartbreak. She advances on Hunter, doing nothing to stem her runny nose. There are scrapes and scratches all over her cheeks and the neck.

“You are next,” she hisses through gritted teeth.

Casey strides forward with spread arms and puts herself between Irina and Hunter. Irina’s eyes flash to hers and she looks almost offended, her lip curling into a sneer.

“Move,” she snarls.

Casey, in a great surge of energy, lifts her crossbow and aims its arrow at Irina’s jugular.

“You first,” she retorts, cocking her head.

Irina looks like a child on the brink of throwing a tantrum. She glowers upon Casey with the most pettish of hatred, her lips pursing.

“You always protect this pathetic whelp, and why?” she finally spits, tugging the bowstring back farther. “It would be so easy for you to cut his throat, to break his neck, and then there is one fewer obstacle in your path to victory. You are weak, Casey Blevins. You are _weak_!”

“I’m not the one who’s weak, Irina,” Casey says.

Irina stamps her foot, her jaw clenched, tears starting to spring into her eyes.

“If you kill him now, I will spare you a little longer,” she barks, the arrow pressing into her cheek. “It will be easy. Do it, or I kill you both now!”

Casey is deeply ashamed that she turns her head over her shoulder to look at him, and even more so when he balks away from her, as though he thinks she might actually take Irina up on her offer. She swallows over the painful lump in her throat and swivels her eyes back to Irina, shaking her head.

“Maybe we’ll just have to see which of us can shoot faster,” she says coldly.

Irina’s smile is scathing.

“It will be me,” she says.

Casey’s finger hugs the trigger and the small arrow is flung from it in a blur. It catches Irina in the leg and, when she curses and flinches, she releases the bowstring.

Her arrow whizzes past Casey’s ear and pins Hunter’s shoulder. He lets out a garbled cry, more startled than pained, and Casey whirls around, his name springing to her lips.

She reaches him in two strides and grips the arrow’s shaft, tugging it out. He yelps, doubling over and clutching at the wound, and Casey starts to open her mouth to ask him if he’s okay.

Before the sound can come out of her, though – before she can truly absorb the sight of blood flowering over Hunter’s shoulder as he grits his teeth – she hears the whistle of a projectile through the air behind her, the crunch of it through bone.

Time slows to an eerily dangling pace, all of the wilderness blurring into one. Irina stands with her legs apart and her bow discarded, her hands hovering and her eyes fixated puzzledly on a javelin that’s impaled her straight through the torso.

Casey’s eyes fly to the trees. Jade is crouched in the underbrush, her eyes aflame with both visceral triumph and utter terror. When she locks gazes with Casey, she makes a small choking noise and flees. Neither Casey nor Hunter follow her. Her footfalls fade into the nighttime, and Casey dully prays that no mutts are wandering, that she does not cross paths with Ike.

Irina seems fiercely lovely even near death, the protruding spear sending a perfect blossom of scarlet out over her shirt. Casey, rather than running, rather than leaving her to live out her last moments of agony alone, kneels in front of her, her eyes hard. She does not touch her.

“You,” Irina whispers. Her gaze is glassy. Her lips spasm up, and she wheezes out a rueful chuckle. “I… I should have shot an arrow through your throat long ago. I was foolish in my mercy.”

Casey says nothing. Hunter lingers unsurely behind her, red running between his fingers.

“I have been wondering,” Irina says calmly, her eyes sliding with tranquil focus to look upon the full moon. It reflects in them, a perfect disc of nacreous white. “Wondering for many hours now. Now that Fortunato is gone. I understand, Hunter; I understand now, the way you look at her. How can they ask this of us, when people like him…?”

She jerks, blood bubbling at her mouth and trickling down her chin. Casey hears Hunter make a noise behind her that’s half a sob and half a retch.

“I had thought that was weakness, once,” Irina continues. “The praying. The sparing. But it is not. It is I who is weak. It is I who—”

She breaks off, and the steely façade of the deadliest Career breaks with it; in a second, her face has screwed up into a pitiful expression of pain, and tears have sprung into her eyes, and she is gripping Casey’s shirt with one hand, and she lets out a little girl’s whimper, curling up.

“Mama,” she sobs softly. “ _I neúspikh. Trymay̆ mene,_ Mama _… Ya boyusya_ … _tse bolyache, b-bol_ …” *

There is a moment of quiet between the last of her delirious plea and the sound of the cannon. Hunter is crying, muffled and messy.

“Stop,” Casey whispers to him.

She stands, and Irina’s hand falls limply to the ground.

When Hunter’s sniffling grows louder and more fevered, she whirls around and strikes him, open-handed, across the cheek. “ _Stop it_!”

Hunter clutches his face, but when his eyes meet hers, they’re still red-edged and glistening, and his lower lip is trembling, and his whole body is shaking.

“I can’t,” he blurts out, and that seems to open the floodgates, for he falls down onto his knees and fists his hair into his hands and repeats, shouting, wailing, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I want my mom, I—”

Casey grits her teeth and hefts him up by the arm. He does not stumble again, and when she leads him, he follows, but he doesn’t stop crying, either.

 

 

* * *

 

 

By the time Hunter’s tears have finally, _finally_ ended, the Gamemakers have mercifully given back the daylight. Casey is circling them back toward the Cornucopia, in the admittedly unlikely hopes that there will still be things of use waiting for them there. Their feet are aching and Hunter’s shoulder is still bleeding, and Casey knows that within another hour or so it will be infected if they don’t find medicine. She had blown it with their sponsors when she’d spoken to Jade in the cave about her refusal to play by the Games’ rules; if she’s going to defy them, then they’re going to defy her.

“Casey,” Hunter mumbles weakly. “’M tired…”

“Just a little further,” Casey lies. “You’ll be okay.” Another lie.

“Your hair looks really beautiful,” he whispers, distantly, a casual observation. Casey doesn’t reply.

She thinks she can see the Cornucopia far, far ahead, its walls barely visible through the gathered trees. She wants to break into a jog, wants to fly to it, but every inch of her is thick with exertion, and she’s so thirsty and so _hungry_ that she’s suspecting that her stomach is on the brink of consuming her ribs. She’d peed a little, half an hour ago, and it had been a dark golden brown.

The explosion comes out of nowhere.

It’s not the boom of a cannon; that much is obvious, because it rips through the air with such violent force that Casey’s ears ring loudly in protest. She claps her hands over them, and through her stinging eyes, she sees Hunter stumbling ahead of her, half-trotting with a blatant limp toward the Cornucopia. It clicks into place in her head, then— _land mines_.

The Gamemakers must have activated them sometime between the aftermath of the bloodbath and now, stringing them in a circle around the Cornucopia clearing to take out any tributes who would inevitably have the same idea that Casey had.

Indistinct faces race through her head, and she feels bile starting to rise toward her nostrils when a freckled and red-haired girl’s sharpens against the front of her skull, and she dashes forward, falling into maladroit step beside Hunter.

Casey’s insides wither up and tumble to her knees when they finally reach the outskirts of the field. They do not cross into it; they know better.

Jade’s sinewy body is mangled, but somehow still whole, even though her innards are spilled out over the oxalis and the wild daisies. Streams of red trace the curve of her chin and her fingers twitch uselessly, and a bone sticks out of her right thigh.

Ike is knelt beside her. He’s holding her hand.

“Ike?” she squeaks in a voice lighter than air. She lifts an arm toward her stomach and her palm hovers there, trembling erratically.

Ike’s face is hard and his eyes are fixed on their intertwined hands. He doesn’t speak.

“Ike…” Jade whispers. “It doesn’t hurt.” She squeezes his fingers. “Is it b-bad?”

Ike dips his chin and raises it again, his ferociously concentrated gaze never faltering. It’s almost frightening, how intently he’s looking at her knuckles. His thumb strokes her wrist bone, and his mouth starts to quaver. Gone is the smarmy and salacious Career with the crooked smirk and the flippant attitude; he has been replaced by a boy with a cut on his forehead and a body too small for his anger.

“Yes,” he says.

“I-I’m gonna die,” she mumbles, coughing feebly. Blood splashes in her mouth. “Aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Y’know, I… I was wr-wrong about you.” Jade gazes up at the sky, her eyes hooding almost serenely. She shifts her hand so that her fingers are perfectly laced between his, and she gulps down a choke, wincing. “You’re not so bad. I g-guess.”

“Yes, I am,” Ike protests, and it is the most honest that Casey has ever heard him.

“Your dad’s gonna be so p-proud of you, Ike,” she promises him. “Thanks. For looking out for me.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” he warns her gently. He shifts so that he’s sitting down beside her, their hands still joined, and he gazes out over the landscape, sighing.

“Ike.” The way she says his name is always so wondrous. She scrabbles at his arm until she’s clutching at his sleeve, her eyes widening with awe as they regard the empty sky. “I see… I see them. Little silver streaks in the sky. They’re so pretty. I…”

The cannon punctuates the unspoken sentence, and Hunter is crying again, swearing under his breath, fisting a clump of his hair and tugging at it. Ike does not so much as flinch at the sound – for a single, foolish moment, Casey almost thinks that he doesn’t know they’re there.

“I’m giving you a free shot, Blevins,” he says idly, without looking at her. “Of the non-figurative variety, because let’s face it, I’m _way_ out of your league. You may as well take it, honestly; I’ve grown bored of this. All of this. It’s really just far too messy for my tastes, and I’ve never been the outdoorsy type, if you want the truth.”

The façade crumbles when Casey doesn’t answer him. He finally turns his head, and when he does, Casey sees that his face has contorted into a sorrowful grimace, as though he’s about to shed tears, but his eyes are perfectly dry.

“I’m asking you as a favor,” he rasps. “I may look like Victor material, but it’s like you said, isn’t it? Looks can be deceiving. So I’ll make this humble request one more time. Show me how good that aim of yours is. I’m intrigued.”

“Casey, don’t,” Hunter begs her, but it’s not the first time she does not do as he says.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Hunter’s shoulder gets worse, just as Casey had predicted. They’re forced to turn back from the Cornucopia, hobbling without aim through the endless forest, and Casey doesn’t even know where they are anymore, doesn’t even know where they can go. When it gets too hard for Hunter to keep himself walking, Casey slings his arm around her shoulders and holds him up, and they limp out of rhythm together, like pathetic wounded animals searching for a quiet place to die.

Casey’s neck and face sting from sunburn. Her knees twinge intermittently. She’s almost certain she sprained her left ankle. Her breathing is labored, but not as much as Hunter’s, which is coming in and out of him in shallow, erratic wheezes that whistle and whine.

The Gamemakers turn on the rain again, even though they do not change the arena to night. Casey is almost certain that this is what blindness must be like, because the only thing she knows is there anymore is Hunter’s index finger, periodically curling to stroke a short line up her elbow, to let her know that he’s not dead yet.

“Tell Andy that all my best comics are under my bed,” he mumbles at one point, and if Casey had the strength to slap him, she would.

“Shut up,” she growls. “Shut _up_. Don’t say another fucking _word_ like that; do you hear me?”

“Um, I th-think I… I think that’s a cave, to the right.” Hunter’s voice is incoherent and his pointing arm is vague, but Casey sees it, too – they’ve been hiking up the short stone cliffs running along what she thinks is the southmost river, and there’s a crevice up ahead, tucked in among the water-darkened rock. It’s framed by two nightlock bushes.

Casey grunts as she steers Hunter and herself toward it, and Hunter pushes off of her, maneuvering himself lamely but successfully inside, lying down against one of the walls and tucking his breaking body into the fetal position. Casey’s breath clouds in front of her when she shuffles on crouching legs to follow him, and she drops into a kneel in front of him, her hand resting on his forehead.

His fever has not subsided since she’d checked it earlier. Her shoulders sink in desolation, but when she moves to draw away, Hunter’s fingers dart up and clasp her wrist, holding her in place. His eyelids are fluttering, and his face is ashen, but he’s smiling, wan.

“I ’member the first time I saw you,” he croaks, and even though his grip slackens, Casey doesn’t make any move to leave him now, smoothing his hair back out of his face. “You were eating an apple. I just… I used to walk an extra mile home from school every day, just to pass your side of town, ’cause I was hoping you’d be there…”

“Shh,” Casey hushes him, because she doesn’t know what else she can possibly do, possibly say.

“Everyone was always so hung up on you, Casey; you just… you never saw it.” She feels like he’s trying to get at something, something important, but he’s forgotten what it is and she still does not know his too-big heart well enough to guess. “You never do. But I know… I know, Casey, I _know_ that if anybody’s gonna do something about this, it’s… it’s gonna be you. That’s why I gave you Mom’s pin; that’s why I…”

Casey can feel the back of the pin crushing into the skin over her breast when she stretches out so that she’s lying beside him, when she lays her head on his chest and slips her leg between his and curls against him, her arm embracing his torso. She’s clinging to him like a sleepy little girl, and the smell of him, grass and soap, mingles with the stench of his blood, but she still breathes it slowly in and closes her eyes.

His fingers tangle into the hair at the nape of her neck, and he toys with it, combing out the knots. After a long time, he turns his head and his dry, wind-torn mouth grazes the skin of her forehead.

He’s asleep soon after that, holding her against him with one arm, his nose splashing even breaths onto her scalp. A part of her, the part that she should have cut out long ago if she were truly to heed her father’s counsel, wants to stay like this until the world grows bored of watching them; he is so warm, and he fits her so nicely, and he mumbles things in his sleep and sometimes clutches her a little tighter when the nightmares come, and she wishes that her blood-soiled arms only knew how to hold him. It's a stupid wish, a little girl's, but, she realizes in a rush that makes her want to cry, it has kept her knees from buckling from the first moment they had boarded that train.

She slips slowly out of his grasp, the pattering rain masking the squelching of the earth beneath her. He mumbles, but does not wake.

She leaves him there, venturing out into the tempest to search for wood. She will spark a fire for him with her own teeth if she has to. She has decided, now. She has decided how this is going to end.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The rain abates a little on her way back to the cave, and for a single ethereal moment, the clouds part to reveal the forest aglitter with dew. Her arms are laden with kindling, and she had found a parachute out there; on the other end of it had been a box containing healing salve and medicine and bandages and jerky.

A note had accompanied it: _Make it interesting. If you can draw this out, may allow two victors. —Lara_

She runs the rest of the way to the spot where Hunter is still waiting for her, unable to hold back the grin on her face. The sound of her footfalls startles the blue jays into flight, but she does not slow until she has reached the carved-out cavern, until she spies red hair in its dim depths. She has to halt there, bending over and resting a free hand on her knees to catch her breath.

“Hunter,” she gasps out after a moment, lifting her ecstatic eyes to meet his. “You won’t believe what—”

She notices the purple stain on his lips before the apologetic quirk in their corners.

She drops the kindling, and it clatters, but she ignores it, cursing and surging forward to fall to her knees beside him.

She grips him tightly at the shoulders until her nails dig into his skin and heaves him up, propping him against the stone wall of the cave. He coughs, a wet, pitiful sound.

“Hunter,” she whispers, disbelieving, too high-pitched and strained. “Hunter, _Hunter_ ; what did you do?”

“I kept count,” he tells her. He sounds dazed. “We’re the last two. You’d make a better rebel than me anyway.”

“Are you insane?” Casey screams, no longer caring about appearances. Her voice blubbers from messy tears that she had not noticed being shed. “Are you _fucking_ —”

“Hey, shh,” he hushes her, and his arm shakes when he lifts it, when his hand smooths her matted golden hair with reverence. “I’m good. Just—fight ’em for me, okay? You’re good at it, and we… they need you. They all need you.”

 _I need **you**_ , Casey’s mind spurts, but her mouth says instead, “You _idiot_.”

Hunter smiles. It’s lopsided, but it still knots her insides. Something surges through her whole body, an inconsolable need to hold him in the darkest crevice of this cave and be held in return by those arms that can’t do anything useful, until the world and the audiences and the Capitol forget that they’re there, until the spring comes around again.

“I should’ve killed you,” she hears herself sob out, half a shout. Her lips are shaking plaintively. “I should’ve, I _should’ve_ —”

“We’re at the Bloor,” he croaks in that forever dreaming voice of his, and his fingers graze ear before wandering to rest at her cheek. She holds them there with both dirty hands, her teeth gritted. “You and me, we’re at the Bloor. Maybe… with that picnic.”

“You can’t have a picnic at a movie theatre,” she rasps, eyes watering with unshed tears, even though it’s the last thing she should be saying to him right now.

His eyelids are starting to droop, and his stomach to spasm, and his hand to stiffen in hers. A gurgle sprouts in his throat. Casey presses his knuckles to her forehead and rocks on her knees. And she cries.

“Yeah… I know,” he murmurs. His words come out in delirious rushes. His whole body, so much smaller and frailer now, is shivering, on the brink of convulsing. “G...Get ’em, Casey.” His eyes meet hers, dimming and afraid. “G-Get ’em all. I know you can, I know you can. ’Kay? Ev’ry last…”

Casey feels his pulse go still against the heel of her palm. She whimpers his name, in a tiny and questioning voice, but it is lost under the sound of the last cannon firing in the rain.

 

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

She remembers him now. Fuck. _Fuck_. She remembers him now, she thinks as they place the golden laurels on her head. She remembers him now, she thinks as the President’s daughters lift her hands in theirs and the entire world erupts into applause. She remembers him now, she thinks on the train ride back to District Seven. She remembers, she thinks when she sees Andy waiting at the station, holding up a piece of paper that says, in messy scrawl, “WELCOME HOME HUNTER.”  

She had been nine, reading a picture book under an oak tree, and Hunter’s father had come to chop it down. She had been too angry to commit the red-haired boy with him to memory, but after she lost the fight for her tree and held back her tears, she heard a cracking and nervous voice break up the sound of the ax chopping away.

“This’d be a nice spot for a picnic,” it had said. “Don’tcha think? I’m Hunter, by the way.”

“Casey,” she had muttered, her book pressed to her chest.

“I’ve, um…” A nervous chuckle. “I’ve seen you around before. Around here, I mean. Once or twice. In, uh, passing. Listen, I—I’m really sorry about your parents.”

Casey had departed without preamble. The voice had not called for her to come back, and she had always been grateful for that.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

Casey Blevins wins the Hunger Games at sixteen. The Capitol praises her and pampers her and claps its hands and sends her back to District 7 on the same train as Hunter’s body.

The wooden marker that Andy makes for it is uneven and novice, and the “R” is backwards at the end of Hunter’s name. By the time the snow comes, the morning glory pin Hunter had given her has lost much of its luster, but she still wears it proudly on her breast the day she leaves District 7 to start a war, and she does not look back.

She will burn it all, she decides. She will burn it to the ground. Maybe, if she gazes at the fire long enough, it will start to look like hair.

**Author's Note:**

> * Translated phonetically from Ukrainian, so translators won't help you. The rough (hopeful) translation is: “Mama, I have failed you. Hold me, Mama; I’m afraid. It hurts… It hu…”


End file.
